John Summerfield wrote:
Todd Zullinger wrote:
David Boles wrote:
The specific person mentioned has no DVD drive to read a DVD of any
kind nor does he have Internet access of any kind. So what now?
I didn't know the premise was about the mythical man with no internet.
For folks without net access or a dvd to boot from, I'd probably give
them a USB key that had the dvd iso on it. From that, they could
extract the boot.iso, boot from that and install from the dvd iso on
the usb key.
That's just one of many ways such a problem could be handled. But I
don't happen to know anyone in such a pickle, so I don't have much
preference about how they solve their problem. :)
Mine is a particular case of a more generic problem. I can overcome my
particular case, but I'm proposing a solution that works for more
people, including people without great skill.
in my particular case, I have a system, Athlon XP 2200+ or so, with
USB1.0 and a CD drive. I _can_ carry it around the place and connect it
to a good network, but that doesn't solve this kind for everyone.
I have here a Fedora 8 DVD, it came attached to APC Magazine. If I have
it, so have a few hundred thousand other Australians, and then there are
those other magazines such as Linux Format and linux Magazine that also
attach the latest Fedora (and many other distros over the course of the
year).
Here, where I am right now, I have ADSL2+ and can download at 1.2
Mbytes/sec or so, so downloading is not a problem. At home, though,
broadband of any speed is not available, and nor is any machine with a
DVD drive. My wife has a new digital camera, she needs the latest
excellence in digital photography software.
So there are two ways I can get a DVD: off a magazine, and by downloading.
If the DVD (and the ISO DVD image) contained CD images, then I could
easily burn a set of CDs. I could insert the DVD and burn from there. Or
I could do something like this:
mount -o loop,ro <dvd image> /mnt/cdrom
and proceed as if I had a DVD mounted at /mnt/cdrom.
APC magazine and the others might include a script just to help burn
CDs, it's not hard for someone with basic linux skills (IE the person
downloading or creating a DVD image).
Probably a silly question...but considering the problem that your trying to
solve is fedora the best distro choice for the target community? I mean
fedora tends to be leading/bleeding edge with frequent updates and a short
release cycle.
Wouldn't it be somewhat better to go with something like CentOS which
already has CD ISO images? A distro such as CentOS is also more stable...as
in less frequent updates. So, if you don't have internet access no need to
worry about how to get the 47 or so updates that come out every so often.
--
Be incomprehensible. If they can't understand, they can't disagree.
