Steve Langasek wrote:
On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 10:26:13PM -0300, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
wrote:
> On Dom 13 May 2012 21:40:10 Marco d'Itri escribió:
> [snip]
> > Does anybody actually know that people routinely try to install desktop
> > systems with only a CD and no networking, and why?
> > What is the use case for this? Cheap DVD readers have been around for
> > over 10 years now.
> Actually, I was going to ask exactly that. To the best of my knowledge,
> CDROM players have been out of stock for a while (more than two years?)
> Normally people will buy a DVDROM player. Well, at least here in
> Argentina :-/
> Could it be reasonable to drop graphical desktops environments for one-CD
> installs? If you want a GDE, get the DVD. Or two or more CDs.
As a data point, the 12.10 Ubuntu release, which is in about the same time
frame as wheezy, will not include a CD-sized desktop image. After holding
this line for a long time, it's been decided that we've passed the point of
diminishing returns and that *slowly* allowing an increase in image size
(e.g., 800MB for this cycle instead of 736MB) allows us to define the
default install in terms of what's useful instead of just in terms of what
we can fit on a CD.
So to use the image you need either a DVD or a USB stick, and if you're
using a write-once DVD you're perhaps wasting the unused space; but the
download time and install footprint are still kept low and in the range of
what a CD would give.
Maybe worth considering something similar for Debian.
Interesting. I was going to suggest doing the same.
I do not know people regularly trying to install on desktop systems with
only a CD drive and no (software) networking. I do use CD isos, however.
I regularly download the KDE CD 1. The reason why I'm not using the
netinst instead is that I save install time, and sometimes some download
when I test the CD on several PCs. But, if I write the iso to a CD,
that's only because I would need to stand up to reach the rewritable
DVDs (due to an historical artifact of my desk's setup) and because I'm
going to install to a machine where USB sticks are more painful to boot
(but the last machine I had for which this was the case died recently).
So for me, the interest of CD 1 is that it approximates fairly well the
package set I'm going to end up installing - more than either netinsts
or DVD 1. If I had another media scoring equally well on that front, I
would only consider fitting on a CD as an extremely marginally useful
feature.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4fb3efe4.2060...@gmail.com
