On 6/14/2012 10:39 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Brian K. White wrote:
On 6/13/2012 3:45 PM, Nelson Marques wrote:
DVD is most likely the nicest media to share on events and specially in places/people which don't have broadband. I don't believe it should be touched.
It is possible to burn ISOs which are only 3995000000 bytes sized onto a normal DVD-R medium, no problem.
Considering that most people agree that the LiveCD should move to 1GB, it sounds weird to shring the DVD media in 9% because of 4Gb USB sticks where in the civilized world a 8Gb USB stick goes for less than 6€'s (5.99 on Media Markt). Makes absolutly no sense to me... And in those cases where people might not have broadband to download and require optical media (like a DVD) you are nuking away 9% of the available storage because... well... someone thinks people use 4Gb sticks ;)
Sounds like the perfect strategy to me :)
I only ever use PXE to install or repair anymore. Anywhere in the civilized world old pc's and new netbooks are cheap and plentiful to run pxe servers on, so it makes absolutely no sense to me why we even bother with cd's or dvd's or usb sticks, everyone should just have a pxe server and a full rsync mirror of the full suse ftp site ;) Sounds like the perfect strategy to me :)
That's what I do too, although I leave it to squid to cache the repositories. Works very well, except in some corner cases where PXE booting doesn't work or isn't supported.
I do in fact boot most new installs and even remote repair/rescues from pxe, but you realize I was actually just joking to make a point right? I happen to be well outfitted to use pxe in most cases. I have numerous pc's and servers and netbooks and appliances all over the place, and I'm comfortable setting up the dhcp and tftp and http servers and configuring all 3 to work together to make a working boot/install system. That does not make it anywhere near a reasonable expectation for everyone, or even a large percentage of everyone. Even if they had an option in commodity home routers to serve up an iso via pxe, it would _still_ be utterly crazy as a general requirement. I assume the same is true when it comes to internet speed and bandwidth caps and usb thumb drives. Saying "8G drives are $6 is actually kind of gross. That means, all those 4G drives you already own are what? Throw them away even though you paid $30 for them? Just gross. These days I boot all my servers from usb (for normal running, not for installing or rescue) because the hard drives are all software raid using the whole drives no partitions, and I have to fight like crazy with each new motherboard to figure out just what magic secret recipe makes that particular motherboard boot reliably from usb. Sometimes it has to be placed in one special usb port, sometimes the machine needs to lose wall power during reboots or else it won't recognize the usb stick except the first time, sometimes I have to do a lot of trial & error to firgure out how to get grub and/or yast bootloader to reliably create a bootable system, or at least reliably do kernel/mkinitrd updates without breaking it if I set it up manually initially, sometimes the partition must be below a certain size, sometimes the entire stick must be below a certain size, sometimes it must be dos fdisk partitioned, sometimes it must have a fat filesystem, sometimes it can be any size and any fs, sometimes it must have a specific dos mbr, no grub or anything else in the mbr, usually there are non-obvious bios settings that must be worked out, ... it goes on and on, and in case that wasn't bad enough, mostly none of this is documented in anyone's manuals. But cd's _always_ work ever since the first bootable cd's even existed. I prefer to fight with usb and make it work in each case because the fight is getting easier as time goes on, and because the random-access re-writable usb is just so much more handy and flexible than even a technically rewritable cd-rw. cd-rw still must be mastered and burned. You can't just go add a few more files or edit a config file like you can with a usb. But it is still a fight and nothing remotely like the universality of a cd. If I had to give 1000 boot disks to 1000 strangers, it would absolutely be a cd or dvd and not a usb even if the usb's were free and the cd's were $.50 each. Really today we're still in a transition period where you really need both. There may be too many old machines with poor or inconsistent usb boot ability, but there are also now too many new machines that have no optical drive. So you just need both for now. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org