On Tuesday 16 January 2007 08:36am, Jeremy Katz wrote:
On Mon, 2007-01-15 at 23:24 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Naoki (naoki@valuecommerce.com) said:
DVDs are a pain, they are cumbersome and too small to fit a full OS
... then perhaps that the OS is so big is the problem. :)
More seriously...
So would it not make sense to have an "everything" ISO for use on removable USB devices?
*Shrug*. Wouldn't really make sense for it to be an ISO, from a raw FS standpoint. You could have a torrent that just makes a directory, even.
ISOs are convenient from a distribution standpoint just to ensure that things were downloaded correctly[1]. I can see how spending some time to make the "install from a USB device" a little bit easier could definitely have advantages.
Agree. But perhaps it's not an ISO, but just a "usb-disk.cpio" that's 8GB+ (whatever) in size. That could be downloaded and extracted to wherever, be it a USB disk or a file server (NFS, etc.).
At the same time, I don't think that the areas for which DVDs are a problem will be better off with large USB storage devices.
Agreed. For those environments, network installs typically make much more sense. Even on my home systems, I do network installs when I can because it's typically faster and easier than swapping CDs or burning DVDs.
However, to set up a network installation with all available packages, I would probably just continue to create my own mirror of the released packages and of the updates repo. But I agree that having a single file to download for initial setup of such file servers would be advantageous. It could also be the "roll-your-own-fedora-spin-kit" with all fedora packages + the spin tools (to build DVD and CD ISOs).
Jeremy
[1] Also, for ensuring that people don't delete things because "I don't need that" then leading to install problems. Not that such a thing ever happened with hd tree installs :-)
Yup.