CD and DVD ISO images

[John Summerfield]

Ed Greshko wrote:
> John Summerfield wrote:
>> Todd Zullinger wrote:
>>> David Boles wrote:
>>>> The specific person mentioned has no DVD drive to read a DVD of any
>>>> kind nor does he have Internet access of any kind. So what now?
>>>
>>> I didn't know the premise was about the mythical man with no internet.
>>> For folks without net access or a dvd to boot from, I'd probably give
>>> them a USB key that had the dvd iso on it.  From that, they could
>>> extract the boot.iso, boot from that and install from the dvd iso on
>>> the usb key.
>>>
>>> That's just one of many ways such a problem could be handled.  But I
>>> don't happen to know anyone in such a pickle, so I don't have much
>>> preference about how they solve their problem. :)
>>
>> Mine is a particular case of a more generic problem. I can overcome my 
>> particular case, but I'm proposing a solution that works for more 
>> people, including people without great skill.
>>
>> in my particular case, I have a system, Athlon XP 2200+ or so, with 
>> USB1.0 and a CD drive. I _can_ carry it around the place and connect 
>> it to a good network, but that doesn't solve this kind for everyone.
>>
>> I have here a Fedora 8 DVD, it came attached to APC Magazine. If I 
>> have it, so have a few hundred thousand other Australians, and then 
>> there are those other magazines such as Linux Format and linux 
>> Magazine that also attach the latest Fedora (and many other distros 
>> over the course of the year).
>>
>> Here, where I am right now, I have ADSL2+ and can download at 1.2 
>> Mbytes/sec or so, so downloading is not a problem. At home, though, 
>> broadband of any speed is not available, and nor is any machine with a 
>> DVD drive. My wife has a new digital camera, she needs the latest 
>> excellence in digital photography software.
>>
>> So there are two ways I can get a DVD: off a magazine, and by 
>> downloading.
>>
>> If the DVD (and the ISO DVD image) contained CD images, then I could 
>> easily burn a set of CDs. I could insert the DVD and burn from there. 
>> Or I could do something like this:
>> mount -o loop,ro <dvd image> /mnt/cdrom
>> and proceed as if I had a DVD mounted at /mnt/cdrom.
>>
>> APC magazine and the others might include a script just to help burn 
>> CDs, it's not hard for someone with basic linux skills (IE the person 
>> downloading or creating a DVD image).
> 
> Probably a silly question...but considering the problem that your trying 
> to solve is fedora the best distro choice for the target community?  I 
> mean fedora tends to be leading/bleeding edge with frequent updates and 
> a short release cycle.

It is a silly question:-) It misses the point, which is to make Fedora 
easier to share and to install on machines which lack DVD drives and 
good Internet access.

> 
> Wouldn't it be somewhat better to go with something like CentOS which 
> already has CD ISO images?  A distro such as CentOS is also more 
> stable...as in less frequent updates.  So, if you don't have internet 
> access no need to worry about how to get the 47 or so updates that come 
> out every so often.
> 
haven't you noticed my description of Fedora?
http://fcp.surfsite.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=45800&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&start=0

-- 

Cheers
John

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