Fedora desktop spin size issues, update

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 14:49 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 13:28 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Hey,
> > 
> > Is it really worth the effort to keep our flag spin on a CD? I really
> > don't think so.
> 
> Probably not.
> 
> However, the constraint being addressed for testing here is "a
> more-or-less functional image that fits on whatever media the tester
> happens to have", which means aiming for 700M is a worthwhile target.
> Maybe we need separate test kickstarts depending on the test profile?
> Maybe.  We'd still have to play a size game.
> 
> For actual live images, there's still a benefit in aiming small.
> Seeking on optical media sucks, bandwidth isn't free, etc.  So we should
> really be coming at this from other end: figure out how much space we
> need to get a reasonable experience, and then see what media target is
> near that size and tighten our belts if necessary.  We could probably do
> a decent job in a mini-dvd form factor, I suspect.

I think most testers actually use USB keys. If they don't, then it's
probably a bug. FWIW, I've also heard complaints from various people
that 

 1. we don't do a good job of advertising USB media; and 

 2. we don't offer downloads of USB images

I think that 2. is a slight misunderstanding; it's just not how things
work since there is no standard USB key size. So we can't really offer
people an image.

We could probably do a better job for 1. by 

 a) having a simple relocatable GTK+ app that people can run on any
    even-not-so-recent version of Linux in order to transfer the image
    to media (heck, we have that for Win32 expect that it's Qt and
    not GTK+, not that it matters but...).

 b) do a better job at telling people it's much more convenient to
    use usb keys (it's much faster, for starters) - e.g. this page
    http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora could probably be more helpful
    insofar that it should talk about USB keys first and "installable
    Live CD" second....

Just solving b) would probably go a long way. Anyway, I'm clearly
rambling. Sorry about that.

Anyway, one point here is that we should aim for building something that
fits on USB keys. That means we probably needs to stay withing 2000MB
compressed - which should be enough space given that our current limit
is 700MB (I'm guessing 2GB is a good minimum size of the USB key
population out there).

    David