[Ambassadors] EMEA Media, All desktop spins on one disc, All full install DVDs on one disc

[Jukka Palander]

Hi, My comments in between.

On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 16:32 +0200, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 13.10.2010, 14:54 +0200 schrieb Jukka Palander:
> > On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 12:17 +0200, Sascha Thomas Spreitzer wrote:
> > > Dear freedorians,
> > > 
> > > we were researching the technical possibility of putting more then one
> > > live cd on one disc.
> > 
> > clip, clip...
> > 
> > OK. I understand that we are still keeping old live CDs and Installation
> > DVDs in place. Anyhow my thoughts are that:
> > 
> > 1) dual layer discs are expensive
> 
> Not for us in production. One dual layer DVD can replace different CDs,
> thus we save money.

Not for the production, but people tend to copy Fedora for their friends
(I do hope) so it is not good for them and therefore it is not good for
spreading Fedora out! We are reducing our "market" if we make a
distribution which is hard to copy "on the spot". ->Most of the people
do not have dual layer discs at home!

> > 2) dual layer discs are much more unreliable
> 
> I hear that for the first time.

They are some about twice as much unreliable than normal single layered
discs due the double capacity! Easy! Also they get affected much easily
by the "bad" reader. (ie. disc drive when burning was horizontally
installed and reproducing drive is in vertical position).

> > 3) dual layer discs does not work on every DVD-reader (especially old
> > computers)
> 
> If someone really has a DVD drive that cannot do dual layer, it is
> likely that his machine will not run Fedora anyway. We already have high
> hardware requirements. I'm not saying they are good, I just say that I
> doubt we are excluding more people from using Fedora.

High hardware requirements?

Why on earth we say in the F13 installation disc back-cover the
following:

"Minimum Requirements:
400MHz Pentium II or better with 384 MB RAM"

This does not sound "high spec" to me!

> > 4) dual layer discs are slower to read
> 
> According to the media company, but nobody has seen numbers.

They "just must be" because the splitted laser ray and processing. How
much slower - I do not know.

> > 1) Do we (Fedora) get "bad-will" from it when people feel that;
> >  -it is so big to download
> >  -it is not working on my computer after (a long) download
> >  -disk is damaged too easily etc.
> 
> Who says they are more susceptible? 

I do say so because I work with the people and I hear comments from
them.

> >  -it is so huge package (others are much smaller)
> 
> We are not talking about media for download here, we are talking about
> physical media. If the files are available for download too, they are
> just an additional offer but not a replacement for other images.

Yap. I did point this out in the beginning of the first mail. Anyhow
"people out there" may not understand this and they may start demanding
the complete package (without knowing if it is working on their computer
or not).

> > 2) How does this affect to Freemedia project?
> 
> Not at all. We are not talking about free media here, these media are
> for marketing purposes only. They are distributed by ambassadors on
> events, but not through the free media program.

How do we avoid "people out there" asking for this kind of disc?
If it exists they start to question "why I cannot have one"?

> > I do not know. My quick opinion is that maybe we should make what the
> > demand is 
> 
> What is the demand? It's hard to predict that before an event. One
> problem we are facing ATM is that we have media left all over Europe,
> but one only has Gnome while somebody else has KDE. 
> 
> Same goes for i386 vs. x86_64. The audience on events differs a lot,
> e.g. in Fosdem people asked for 64bit live media all the time (which we
> did not produce), on CLT everybody wanted 32bit.

Demand is (for me) that what people asks me to hand out.

> > and at least for me it is to be able to hand out an
> > installation DVD which is working for both i686 and 64bit (because
> > people do not know which one they are using) but only have Gnome.
> > 
> > Does this kind of compilation fit into the one normal single layer DVD?
> 
> If we only do one desktop, say GNOME, it's definitely possible to get
> everything on one single layer DVD. If not, we will have to leave out
> some packages that are now on the install DVD. So in the end we might
> end up with something that is like the GNOME spin and has no advantage
> over the current images.

Solution was proposed by Scott. Leave development tools out from the
desktop edition. And instead make office tools more complete.

> > Requests for other desktops (KDE and XCFE) are quite small, but this is
> > my opinion only based on the queries I have received.
> 
> Indeed, but this is a corner case where we could save a lot of money
> with the multi desktop live DVD because the small batches (Xfce, LXDE,
> Moblin) are expensive to produce.

You are right. Saving money is good thing but it must not be done if we
see people (in general) seeing that "we are worsening things".

I am only saying we shouldn't do this, I am only saying that "think
first - do after". -just what we are doing now! :-)

> Regards,
> Christoph

Ugh! I have spoken.

--
Jukka