Wild and crazy times for the development tree

[Mike A. Harris]

Callum Lerwick wrote:

>>For each employed person reading this, take 1/10th of your income.
>>Would you pay that much money to have a 56k phone line based internet
>>connection each month?  Even if you did do so, would you want to
>>download the entire DVD ISO image which takes anywhere from 2-3 weeks
>>to download?  All this through a phone line which gets very frequently
>>disconnected?
> 
> 
> Its roughly the same amount of data to download a DVD vs 5 CDs. I fail
> to see how the "bandwidth is expensive" argument applies.

Because you don't actually have to download all 5 CDs to do an install,
unless we have recently made it mandatory that all of them are present
or something.  And downloads do not always succeed, resulting in having
to potentially redownload failed download in progress, or a corrupted
download.  Re-downloading one CD takes less time than redownloading
a DVD.

> Download cost is meaningless in the CDs vs DVDs argument. Its the same.

Only if you download everything always, and have flawless downloads,
which I'm told is not the case.

> The question is, what does one do with the images once downloaded.

Orthagonal issue to actually getting the images downloaded that one
wants in the first place.  It's easier and faster to do an absolute
minimal install, and then perhaps download individual packages
afterward with yum which you'd like to add on top of what you
installed already, than to download the whole DVD or 5 CDs, and then
install it.

Before you suggest doing a network install, think how well that would
work over a 56k or even slower - unreliable dialup line.  I did an
internet install over cable modem twice last week, and I get 200+Kb/s
and it took forever (and then failed due to install time bugs/problems.)


>>I told him perhaps he should just purchase Fedora Core on CD instead,
>>and indicated there were many places online which you could order CDs.
>>He said it would be about $10, which again is like 5% of his monthly
>>income.  And that's a twice a year cost.  He said that buying Fedora
>>CDs locally was more expensive for "free software" than buying bootleg
>>copies of Windows XP down the street for $2-5 a pop.
> 
> This is all a great example of what even a poor broke college student
> like me takes for granted in the US, and is completely missing the
> really useful bits of information:
> 
> 1) So how *does* this person get Fedora, and keep it updated? Do they
> download it at 56k? Do they buy CDs? What?
> 
> 2) Do they have a DVD reader?

The person in question has downloaded some releases and described it
as a very horrible process.  Having myself previously downloaded Red
Hat Linux 4.2 through 6.2 via modem, the older releases at 14.4k and
RHL 6.0 and higher at around 33.6k, I can say that it took about 1-2
weeks to get everything, with very frequent disconnections and other
hassles, all while completely consuming my single telephone line and
thus preventing me from making or receiving phonecalls.  That really
sucked, so I feel the pain of those who do not have high speed.

Mind you, I was able to at least set up my downloading to be able to
resume from where it left off, but even I have ended up having a
downloaded ISO not match MD5sum and not work properly, to have to
redownload it.

(After that, I joined Red Hat, and was sent 7.0 on CDROM, and 6
  months later we got cable modem Internet access in town so I never
  had to feel the pain again since...  although waiting all day for
  a DVD ISO to download is still painful.  ;o)




-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.