That still doesn't change the fact that it's bad marketing practice to overpack the cd's. We're not talking about a lot of space here, D3 is 550m (IIRC), the other 2 are incredibly up there(one is 697 I think, which still didn't cut it, two is just over 700). At times I've thought about joining the Mandrake Club, to show support, but, well, with this practice, I'm inclined not to really, and I'm sure that quite a few others are just the same.
Let me put it like this: If you downloaded software from a company and couldn't use it correctly , or couldn't use it at all, would you pay for it? Would you support it? I wouldn't. In fact, if I'd paid for the product, I'd demand a refund pretty quickly. More importantly if X company refused to follow industry standards (in this case with ISO images), preventing you from burning the cd correctly, BUT Y company and Z company, and even A company gave no problem with this, would you use the ONE company that gave you problems? I wouldn't. The standards (some of the best downloaded and most used versions, judging by the largest beta iso available) Redhat -- 662720 KB Slackware -- 673248 KB FreeBSD -- 660128 KB Mandrake -- 716416 KB I have resorted to having to download my sources directly from cooker, as i've said in the last email, but that is my choice, and my prerogative. Unfortunately, that will mean MORE work for me, as it's been stated over and over again that Cooker isn't stable. But, what other choice am I left with? Sure, I could take my business elsewhere, but I rather LIKE mandrake (even though I have to do the extra work). The point I'm trying to make here is that mandrake is WELL pushing the industry standard for the ISO size and limitations, causing problems with various burners (not ALL drives support overburning, I hope you're aware). The response from mandrake : "we don't care". How does this look for newbies who are thinking about supporting 'drake? The way these CD's are packed is hazardous to say the least. For the ones that can't properly sync these cd's, there's NO solution to install software later, other than re-downloading sources, which creates more work on the end user. The CD is prompted for, and even when inserted, it's worthless, because the drive can't read it to begin with. HOW it's installable even is well beyond my power of understanding, but it is. On Saturday 07 September 2002 06:32 am, Adam Williamson wrote: > On Sat, 2002-09-07 at 03:19, Tom Whiting wrote: > > ask that Mandrake go to standard iso's (between 650 and 690m)?? In this > > case, it wouldn't even involve much more than moving a few files around > > from one iso to the next. there's 3 cd's, 2 of which are packed so full > > they can't see straight, the third is so loosely packed that it's almost > > a waste of 100m space there. C'mon now. > > *sigh* > > We've covered this, very recently. The third CD contains empty space for > good reason. The cheapest bought edition is also 3 CDs in size, and > contains all the software from the download edition plus a small amount > of commercial software. To ease maintenance, they use the same CD1 and > CD2, so the download CD3 has empty space for the commercial software > that appears on that CD in the bought edition. -- ---------------------------------------------------- TJW: Head tech, Dreamless Realms Mud: http://dreamless.wolfstream.net Snippets http://dreamless.wolfstream.net/ Telnet dreamless.wolfstream.net:9275 The OLC Pages http://olc.wolfstream.net ----------------------------------------------------
