Desktop Live DVD: diff

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Thu Nov 5 19:55:01 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 13:35 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 13:24 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > David Zeuthen (davidz at redhat.com) said: 
> > > On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 14:33 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > > > The image size is 1022 M. 
> > > 
> > > This is likely too big, remember drive manufacturers don't really use
> > > units like KiB MiB or GiB - they use 1K = 1000, 1M = 1,000,000 and 1G =
> > > 1,000,000,000 - e.g. the SI units.
> > > 
> > > It seems to me that most 1GB USB keys have a size of 1GB = 1,000M =
> > > 1,000,000,000 bytes. Some are 1024MB (1024,000,000,000 bytes), some may
> > > be a bit smaller (e.g. "value-adds" like the Sandisk U3 "CD-ROM") while
> > > some may actually be 1024 MiB (1,099,511,627,776 bytes). It varies.
> > 
> > Moreover, the closer you get to the full size, the less space you'll
> > have for any overlay.
> 
> Good point. A quick search on the Internet suggests that 2GB sticks can
> be had for < $10. So maybe we should just bite the bullet and target 2GB
> keys and do a 1.7GB (1,700,000,000 bytes) image leaving ~300MB free for
> the overlay. 
> 
> Then leaves both wiggle-room and also enables us to include *compelling*
> stuff like Ogg Theora videos featuring Shadowman etc etc.

Personally I think one of the nice things about a live CD image is it
creates a good restriction for building a nice focused working system in
a reasonable amount of space. 1GB would more or less keep that; 2GB is
starting to introduce an awful lot of wiggle room for not caring about
including useless crap.

And remember, large USB keys may be cheap as chips nowadays but
bandwidth ain't, always. Aren't there still people in Australia with
absurd caps like 10GB/month?

I'm not sure I like the idea, if the idea is 'stop doing a small
functional live image and make our smallest 'complete-out-of-the-box'
image 2GB big'.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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