John Summerfield wrote:
Ed Greshko wrote:
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.
It is a silly question:-) It misses the point, which is to make Fedora
easier to share and to install on machines which lack DVD drives and
good Internet access.
Well, you keep mentioning "Neither helps install sans network" and
statements that seem to indicate that lack of network is part of the hurdle.
I've never had a problem to install on a system without a DVD drive but a
good network connection. I've used the "Live CD" method or downloaded the
DVD iso and did a network install.
So, I guess whatever solution you're proposing is redundant for me.
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.
haven't you noticed my description of Fedora?
http://fcp.surfsite.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=45800&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&start=0
Doesn't ring a bell....
--
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
-- Matthew Arnold
