Re: Bits from the debian-cd team; more CD/DVDs being built regularly
On 12/20/06, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
(...)
Gnome vs. KDE vs. XFCE
======================
The KDE and XFCE variants of CD#1 are now being produced to give more
choice to people for initial installation. By default, CD#1 has always
meant to be enough to install a fully-functioning system, including a
desktop. On sarge, we (just about) managed to make all that fit,
including a choice of KDE or Gnome. However, since the sarge release
the size of the set of packages needed to cover each desktop *and* the
rest of the base system has grown substantially. We're now at the
point where that's just not possible any more. The default CD#1 will
now install a Gnome desktop, and there are replacement CDs that will
install KDE or XFCE instead. Download your own choice. Thanks to Joey
Hess for the work to make these happen.
Let me thanks the debian-desktop, debian-installer and tasksel team
too. Without them, that stuff would be useless.
I would like to clarify that debian-desktop (alioth, svn, mailing
list) is now a unit composed by pkg-gnome, pkg-kde and pkg-xfce and
tasksel members. Joey Hess (d-i and debian-cd) give us all the support
to make stuff happen.
Unfortunately, even the GNOME desktop environment doesn't fit on the
CD#1. You will need broadband connection to fetch some more packages
or use the full DVD#1 for your architecture. The bonus is that KDE
will be there too (full DVD #1). I'm not sure about the latest
statistics on KDE and XFCE alternative desktop CD#1. Joey, could you
give us that information? Btw, i would like to suggest add it
somewhere in the release notes "where's what" in terms of medias. I
can submit patches, after you feed me with info.
Multi-arch
==========
Quick warning to avoid possible confusion: this is nothing to do with
the multi-arch binary support that people are working on. The new
multi-arch discs are designed to be convenient for people who
need/want to be able to install Debian onto multiple different types
of machine from a single disc.
To that end, there is now a combined amd64/i386/powerpc netinst that
is basically an amalgamation of the contents of the individual
netinsts for those arches. This is based on the "etch" d-i version as
described above.
There is also a combined amd64/i386/powerpc/source DVD which should
contain most of what people will commonly want to install on each of
those 3 arches, roughly equivalent to the contents of the first 3-4
CDs or so each. Binary-all package overlaps mean that there is space
on this disc for more packages than might be expected. Plus, sources
for all the binaries on the DVD will be included too. This DVD is
therefore probably the ideal choice of disc to sell or give away at
Expos.
Does it contains desktop, kde-desktop, gnome-desktop and xfce-desktop?
I guess not, but who knows. ;)
In case it's not obvious, the 3 arches picked for these discs are
simply the most common end-user systems out there. There is scope for
producing more multi-arch discs, but the possible combinations are
*massive* :-).
I would like to suggest 'split' the 9 archs left in 3, something like:
- arm, mips, mipsel
- hppa, ia64, s390
- sparc, m68k, alpha
Is it possible? Do you think it will fit ? If yes, i can prepare
patches for debian-cd once i figure out all that pile of changes.
To do
=====
I'm still expecting to add Live CDs to the list here before we
release. Otherwise, I think we're about set. If there's anything else
you'd like us to do or anything you'd like to ask about, please reply
to this mail - note the Reply-To to the debian-cd list.
Do you plan to use the live-package to build the live cds or some new
code into debian-cd ? If you're going to pick live-package i submitted
a patch to Daniel that would permit use a tasksel based approach to
select packages, and not the fixed list as they actually do. I have no
feedback about that until now. It seems they were going to do a major
change in the code.
(...)
regards,
-- stratus
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