On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, John Danielson, II wrote: > There are three ways around this that I can think of:
None of which are necesarry on another distro, or with windows. Remember, there is competition out there, to deliver a *product*, not a hobby. > > 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. > So what? I am not talking about the CD-RW. On one of the machines affected, the CD-RW read the disks better than the CD-ROM, but the disks were written on another burner, and they worked fine on 10 other machines. Since the same machine had installed fine with 8.2 from the same media written on the same drive, I would assume it's only the size that is the issue, and that there wuold have been problems on stamped (aka commercial) CDs. > Any DVD player can read CDs also. I am not going to buy a DVD reader for the approx 10 machines I have in production which don't have DVD drive. Actually, since most of these still run 8.2 (production servers with clients), I don't know if they will install 9.0). > > 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. How???? The machine in question had: 1 1.2 GB hard disk (windows) 1 4 GB disk (Mandrake 8.2) 1 24x CD-ROM 1 2x2x6 CD-RW 1 56k modem (effectively, there is no ADSL or anything faster than 56k availble in South Africa, there are a total of 1600 ADSL points in the country, introduced in Johannesburg about 3 months ago). So, firstly, there wasn't space to copy the whole dist, I could possibly have managed one CD. Secondly, I would have to download up to 50MB of missing packages per CD to get the install to finish. That's at least 15 hours on-line. Thirdly, the person whose machine it was (who was going to do the install herself initially, until all the problems cropped up) would never have been able to accmoplish any of these methods. By the way, I tried to go back to package selection, but: 1)Unselecting packages would not mean they were unselected the next time I was sent back to package selection (assuming I had missed some of the failed packages) 2)You have to know (IIRC) about CTRL-ALT-F2 to see the failed packages 3)It won't let you continue, even if the packages weren't necessary for a working (or half-working dist). I probably went back to package selection about 10 times, trying to unselect the failed packages, and after that decided to fall back to a network install. > > 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. > Booting wasn't the issue. But installation had already stuffed up a workig 8.2 installation. BTW, RH's CD-checking would at least have prevented stuffing up a working install. > 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. So single users shouldn't run Mandrake? I had my laptop there (luckily, hadn;t planned to, and if I hadn't the user would be stuck with windows). Unfortunately laptop drives don't go into desktop machines. > > 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, Oh, come one, the TOC is trivial compared to the CDs. If you can manage to download all 3 700MB ISOs, there's no reason you wouldn't be able to download 3 650MB ISOs and a ... but wait, there is 150MB free on the last disk, you wouldn't need a 4th 650MB disk! So it would be identical (at least with 9.0, if the space for the commercial CDs was moved off the GPL set). OK, John , since you guarantee that anyone will be able to get 9.0 onto any pentium class machine, when I find a machine that can't read the CD, I will let you come and finish the install. Or should I mail you the machine, so you can use DSL? Really, if Mandrake wants market share, and wants to be taken seriously, the installation *must* be bulletproof on every single machine. No excuses. It used to be acceptable for a user to struggle for days to get a linux distribution installed, but that was years ago. Remember that many users will give something *one* chance, maybe two. Windows usually doesn't even need one, since it's pre-installed, and very seldom needs two. If Mandrake ships 9.1 CDs as 700MB's, the machine in question will not be running Mandrake in 2 months time, when the owner of the machine is going overseas, and her parents will be using it for email contact with her. I can't afford to reccomend Mandrake over Windows (for which support would be available) or some other distro that works (like RH 8.0). At present, it's not possible for the user to install software on that machine (supermount is enabled, and the combo of 700MB CDs and supermount means you can't even install RPMs off the CD with rpm, let alone urpmi, you have to copy them off the CD first). Please, Mandrakesoft, consider going back to 650MB ISOs. Otherwise you *will* lose market share. Final question on risks and advantages: 1)Did Mandrakesoft gain market share due to using 700MB ISOs? 2)Did Mandrakesoft lose market share due to using 700MB ISOs? I dn't know if anyone would be able to answer that, but is it worth the risk finding out for sure .... Buchan -- |----------------Registered Linux User #182071-----------------| Buchan Milne Mechanical Engineer, Network Manager Cellphone * Work +27 82 472 2231 * +27 21 8828820x121 Stellenbosch Automotive Engineering http://www.cae.co.za GPG Key http://ranger.dnsalias.com/bgmilne.asc 1024D/60D204A7 2919 E232 5610 A038 87B1 72D6 AC92 BA50 60D2 04A7
