Brian K. White wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Larry Stotler"
To: "Kevin Dupuy" Cc: ; "opensuse" Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 6:03 PM Subject: Re: [opensuse] Opensuse 11.0 Boot iso On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Kevin Dupuy
wrote: Marcus, will there be a "full" set of CDs like we had for 10.3 as well? 'Need for a few clients with no DVD drives.
Like the old 5 CD sets? I don't think so.
Why not? Fred makes a valid point. There are still, even in this day, a lot of machines that do not have DVD drives. This smells a lot like the Windows strategy of obseleting older hardware. That's not the Linux way, and it really should not be the openSUSE way. Some of us are still using 10 year old hardware that at least runs a modern system because of Linux. But we are forced to do things the hard way due to a lack of a usable installation medium. How hard is it to make the CDs? And, it's not that much extra to host. At least allow someone else to host them if the openSUSE guys don't have the space for them.
So do a net install. Better yet, stick a copy of the dvd on a linux box somewhere and loop mount it in htdocs and do a net install via http from your own local host. Could be your local laptop or a pc at home on a cable modem etc... Even a 10/100 nic is probably faster than the cd drive anyways. If your laptop runs windows you could still do it with an unpacked copy of the dvd and apache or iis.
Yet another possible way, I bet you could stick a copy of the iso, perhaps unpacked, on a usb drive and boot from the mini iso and install from the usb drive too with install=device::/dev/sda1 or flip to another vc and manually mount the usb drive and use the mounted local fs path. I bet a usb dvd drive works fine too but I'm being practical and assuming it's more common to already have, or have access to, a usb hd than a usb dvd instead of suggesting you *gasp* buy something.
I'm impressed they put together and still maintain a ppc distribution at all since apple went intel. Thats the amazing part. How it's packaged and delivered is comparatively inconsequential and complaining about one arguably obsolete install option going away on the very latest version of the OS is just being a baby as long as there is still some other way.
If a machine is old enough to not have a dvd drive, it probably already runs 10.3 or some older evrsion and should probably just stay running that version. Smart people don't upgrade production machines for no reason. If a machine has no dvd for some other reason like it's part of a large group of headless boxes or ibm blades that rarely need any kind of removeable media, then the admin for them should have no problem doing net installs and should probably already be doing that anyways. The remaining 12 machines on the planet that are new but with busted dvd drives or were intentionally installed without dvd for some reason and the local admin can't figure out a net install and it's impractical for some reason to just install a $25usd dvd drive (yes, just 25 these days) or use a usb drive, and that are being used for actual production that anyone cares about instead of some dude playing with old hardware for his own amusement, are hardly something suse should waste time on.
Yes, I have an ancient blue&white G3 that runs linux too and I'd do a net install on that even though I replaced it's cd with a $35 dvd-rom ages ago. I also don't actually do anything useful or important with such an old and non-standard box.
Here's a question, Does Apple supply the latest OSX on cd for those old boxes? ... web site says it requires a g4 (well I'm out already on g3) and a dvd drive.
For all of that, it would be simpler to just temporarily install a US-$30 DVD drive. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org