Re: Debian DVDs
> > Seriously, all I want is media big enough to install the
> > base system. Once I have networking, I apt-get the rest.
> > Even media a distribution or two behind is fine, given how
> > effective apt-get dist-upgrade is (esp. with a small
> > install). Sure I get most of my packages from stable but I
> > generally need to get something from testing or unstable
> > anyway, and even from stable, I want the stuff with the security
> > updates!
>
> This is how I install machines at work, too. However, that is *at
> work*, where we have an OC-3. Unfortunately for me, and billions (US
> billions, 9 zeroes) of other people in the world, the best Internet
> access available at home is v.90. That's right, 56k. It's not an
> option to move somewhere with better bandwidth, and I can't drag my
> box to work and back whenever I want to do a mass update (read
> dist-upgrade). It can sometimes be faster to get a CD via next-day
> shipping than it is for me to wait for apt to download everything I
> want to install. This is especially true with home machines, where it
> is not uncommon for one to want GNOME or KDE, which are no small
> beasts. Until everyone has massive bandwidth to the garage, media is
> going to be needed.
Yes, this is the situation in most European countries as well.
64 KBit or 128 KBit with ISDN is the maximum speed here.
DSL is only available at high costs or in big cities to a limited
number of people, so yes, right now a DVD-R would solve big problems
for many people.
Major commercial distributions (Red Hat, Suse) all come with additional
DVD today. So it would be very reasonable to provide a DVD for Debian.
What I don't understand is why you want to use UDF. If you just create
a 4.7 GB ISO 9660 filesystem (ok, a bit larger than the standard ;),
everything will fit in there quite easily. Is there some obvious reason
to use UDF that I'm not aware of ?
I don't think my DVD-videoplayer wants to install Debian.
> > How odd... when I went shopping yesterday for a replacement
> > for my trusty old slink cdrom, all I found were 3-cd sets!
> > All I want is enough to get to networking.
>
> Try the compact floppies. Only three disks.
Yes indeed, you won't even need a CD drive.
Maybe a diskless installation of the deb boot image via the network card's
PROM would be optimal, then you could get rid of the floppy drive as well and
just needed a MB/CPU/RAM, networking and VGA card.
> > How about the opposite extreme of a release DVD: A release-
> > agnostic CD that runs right off the CD, lets you enter a
> > distrib mirror site and your chosen distrib and then runs a
> > network-based install of stable, testing or unstable straight
> > off the net (via ramdisk perhaps).
>
> That's actually a pretty cool idea, for those places where a net
> install makes sense. Could even be one of those credit card CD
> thingies: keep it in your wallet, just in case. ;)
Yes I like the credit card CDs ;)
Bernd
--
ixsoft Softwareentwicklung und -vertrieb Bernd Hentig
Unter den Buchen 22E, D-16244 Altenhof, Germany
Voice ++49 333 63 46 100 Fax ++49 333 63 46 109
Email bernd@ixsoft.de
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