Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, "Why?")

[Tim]

Timothy Murphy:
>> Does anybody nowadays actually burn CDs or DVDs?

Ed Greshko:
> Yes.....  The BIOS on many of the machines I encounter don't support
> booting from USB.

Or the BIOS is none-too-great at booting from USB.

Just recently I had to boot from USB to install onto a laptop with no
optical drive.  I found four different methods of putting a Linux
installer onto a USB.  One of them involved Windows, so that was out.
Two of them were Linux programs for writing installers to the flash
drive.  One required adding things to a current install that I didn't
want to do.  The other was less painful, and worked for writing one
installer to a USB, but not for another (I tried Fedora and Ubuntu on
this laptop).  The last was plain dd if=/install.iso of=/def/flashdrive
(I'm paraphrasing), and that worked for the one that didn't work the
other way.

All of which was more hassle than burning a disc, and was actually
slower than burning a disc for one of the methods (I don't recall which,
but I tend to think it was the dd method).

So, while you can install from a USB, it's not always the most
convenient.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.

George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.