On 09/06/12 05:26, 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?
I made this comment in another list. Only recently, whether by design or accident, there were Milestones (I think[****]) put out which had the name of LIVE CD but which, in fact, were too large for a normal CD and had to be burnt onto a SL DVD. There is little difference in downloading an iso which is ~800MB big which can be burnt onto a SL DVD to one which is ~740MB and intended to be burnt onto a CD. I think the confusion lies in the use of the word "DVD" vs CD, the former automatically giving the impression that the file will be ~4.5GB big. How about allowing what is now considered to be a "CD" sized iso to be be bigger and be burnt to a SL DVD but call this LIVE CD "CDPlus" or "CD+" to identify it that it is not the normal CD size? [***] Correction. I just found one of these "CDPlus" jobs: it was the openSUSE 11.4 LIVE with Gnome #3 which had to go onto a SL DVD. BC -- Using openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 KDE 4.8.3 and kernel 3.4.1 on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel Corsair "Vengeance" RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX550Ti 1GB DDR5 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org