Dennis tapped away at the keyboard with:

This is not going to work in country like Singapore with the horrible ADSL infrastructure monopolised by only one company. I have taken on average 10 hours to ftp an ISO image. And our so-called ADSL is on time-based or capacity-based, very expensive. Cable modem service here is also hopeless at time, a 33.6k dial-up beats the cable modem most of the time at night.

Totally unworkable in Australia as well. xDSL is still in its infancy and limited in speed and availability. The ISO images would cost about AUD$500 to download, with each image taking between 6 and 10 hours. In that time, I can hop on a plane, fly to FRA, pick up a parcel and fly back to PER. Effective modem speeds are frequently closer to 28.8kbps.

...

I still think they should move away from the CDs and towards distribution via limited access ftp through membership fees. They could give those members also the ability to burn a copy of an official release iso pack and not only an evaluation one.

SuSE then could give access sooner to the ones who are paying and they also could give those members access to beta ftp versions before they come out to lessen the amount of bugs once officially released.

It would bring customers closer to the development process. They could also create a SuSE memberbook series which gets revised every 2 years and sent out to all members. That they members have documentation but don't have 4 versions of almost the same manuals.

I know it sounds like a lot of work to implement but it may be useful and the right way to cut costs for SuSE as well as SuSE users.

SuSE comes with a lot of packages. I can't imagine the amount of work it is to keep track of them all. I always wondered why SuSE doesn't create a 'community' which takes care of packaging the smaller numerous apps.

-- Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning Perth, Western Australia -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq

On 18-Oct-00 Paul W. Abrahams wrote:

Purple Shirt wrote:

...

I still think they should move away from the CDs and towards distribution via limited access ftp through membership fees. They could give those members also the ability to burn a copy of an official release iso pack and not only an evaluation one.

The problem with ftp-only distribution is that it's entirely impractical to pick up 3GB worth of material over a connection that's much less than a T1 line.

Paul Abrahams

FTP-type distributions work great...case in point Debian...its updating method is almost entirely FTP. And its probably used worldwide, even in "expensive" dialup areas of the world. ----------------------------------- Arlen Carlson This login session: $13.99, but for you $11.88 This message was sent by XFmail (Linux) -o) /\\ _\_v The penguins are coming... the penguins are coming... ----------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq

On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:

Certainly, obtaining an entire distribution by FTP is impractical for anyone without a high-bandwith connection.

My first distribution was yggdrasil on 30 floppies. All downloaded on a 14.4k modem. Of course SuSE is MUCH bigger then that but you don't really need even 30 floppies to get a working Linux system. The mini-distributions are what one floppy? The other thing is a ftp install would be an install of only what you need. I haven't glanced at what's included in the SuSE package lately but you likely get a bunch of different text editors. A handfull of different newsreaders. I wouldn't want to install over a modem but it's possible. Nick -- ----------------------------- Anybody got plans for an ark? ----------------------------- -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq