Buchan Milne wrote:
On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, [iso-8859-1] G?tz Waschk wrote:Buchan:
True, but chances are that if a user has a CD-ROM drive that won't read aDo we really want a distro that will install on fewer machines thanNo, but you still can install from network or hd.
Windows XP, Redhat 8.1, SuSE 8.2, Lycoris, Lindows and Solaris 9
Intel???????
700MB ISO, hd install may not be that easy (first have to download the
files which can't be read from the CD, or the whole tree, in both
cases assuming there is sufficient space on the hard disk).
But if this problemWarly??? What says Mandrakesoft? (Or is there anyone else not convinced
is easily solvable, it should be done.
700MB ISOs are a bad idea?)
(Of course, for betas which ship only one ISO, 700MB ISOs are probably ok,
since the user probably had to download the ISO anyway, and could do an HD
install from the ISO, in fact I plan on doing that today if I have time.
But beta testers are usually better customers than boxed-set buyers)
Buchan
There are three ways around this that I can think of:
Any burner can also read, and read CDs as big as it can burn, and read every format it can burn. The last three times I stuck Mandrake into a box, it was by using the burner to read the CDs it had burnt many days before.
Any DVD player can read CDs also.
A floppy boot image could be modified so all files from CD were batch-copied to HD, as a tree. Then the boot from the revised floppy image cut to floppy will bypass the pure boot issue totally.
Pentium class machines, which Mandrake is tuned to, yes??, generally are recent enough to have recent HDs. If, then, they cannot boot to CD at all, the user will probably find he has either a dirty CD media, a dirty CD laser lens head, a dirty reflecting mirror inside drive, a bad cable, or a bad stick of RAM in the box, or that the jumpering of CD or HD is wrong-- 99% of Pentium class boxes CAN boot from floppy if a very old CD-ROM drive was not grandfathered into the box and a decent cable.
Way 4-- borrow a CD-ROM drive temporarily from another box, or install Mandrake on the HD that belongs on the target box in a box with a Cd-ROM drive that can boot.
Let's say, for example, that we went to 4 download images at 650 MB. not only does one than have more to download because of the TOC needed in each archive being one more than if the set were fit onto 3 700 MB images, but the likelyhood of four download sessions instead of three increases the likelyhood of needing to redownload one ISO and also the time to check increase because now there are four ISO to check. I would offer a set of 650's as well as a set of 700's, but for shipment or club only, and make it a slightly more limited set and stated as such (3 CDs only). The rest can be grabbed on the web, yes???? those who have read capability for the bigger archives can grab bigger archives adn be happy with a more fully fledged set of files they know are good, and those who choose to rely on the web can take the chance of repeated reacquisition of archives made needful due to the fact that ftp can be locally or remotely fallible, or fallible in transit.
John.
