On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 06:56:40PM +0000, Jon Atkinson wrote:
It would be nice, when Fedora has matured a little (FC3/4?) to see a higher level of support and promotion of the FTP install feature. I know anaconda does support FTP installs, but there is very little in the way of (obvious) documentation of this feature, and from what I've heard and personal experience it is a little flaky. I am an ex-Debian user and I liked the way I could burn a 50mb ISO and run the installer then fetch packages from a local mirror. I know not everyone has DSL access, but a large and growing number of people do, and I think it may soon be time to rethink the ISO distribution model.
I started using FTP install about 4 years ago for the simple reason that I had a floppy drive and no CD on my Sony Vaio C1XD. I would download the Redhat ISOs to another machine on the network, mount the images and extract everything then do my FTP install from that machine.
I discovered yum with Fedora and my current box was updated from Redhat 9 (FTP install from the Vaio BTW) via "yum upgrade".
With 512/128 aDSL the install took about an hour and a half -> two hours. From memory FTP on the LAN takes about 45 minutes or about the same time as from CD-ROM.
My objective is to upgrade several servers I run currently to Fedora Core, and I will probably use yum. Several machines I administer don't have a CD drive, they were installed over the LAN and I haven't had the need for one.
I would rather see a base system and yum on a USB key rather than an ISO.
My 0.02€
Tony Grant