On Friday 08 June 2012 21:26:37 Graham Anderson wrote:
List,
Coolo's recent reports regarding the growing size of our installation media highlight one area where there appears to be no obvious technical solution. We are simply running out of room to squeeze bits into the common capacity optical media that our users are accustom to, namely the CDROM capacity. The pressing concern of this would appear that by increasing the image size for installation via USB fobs or DVD, we might alienate existing or future users that simply cannot easily download an image of growing size.
I wonder if we can perhaps fall back to more low-tech methods to help in this regard. We have a network of user groups, ambassadors and such like. I wonder if we could instigate a program of distribution whereby our users can volunteer to physically burn to disc our latest and then use the relatively cheap national postal services to send the media to our users with low bandwidth connections.
To take it further, optical media while in decline, is still a very profitable market. I'm sure anyone who has burnt discs has had their experience of the longevity of the media. Perhaps we can approach one of the better quality optical media manufactuers and ask for discounts of scale. This would allow us to send spindles of writable discs to areas where we might have a user group or ambassador but has a generally low level of connectivity.
I'm aware of the previous and as I understand now defunct program that canonical sponsored to distribute media, but I have no insight as to it's effectiveness or why it has been stopped. I am suggesting something slightly different, this would hopefully be a community driven effort.
It's not a perfect solution by any means, but I can't think that our increasing need for more space will allow us to use CDROM size media in future.
Thoughts?
Please note that I intend to continue to create and distribute tens of thousands DVD's of openSUSE. These are very popular and we send them out to many ambassadors together with other materials. The downside is that I really can't send them in batches smaller than 100 and not to certain countries due to the costs.
Cheers the noo, Graham