Fedora Core 2 Distribution Size

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sat, 2004-01-03 at 21:48, Jim Cornette wrote:
> Also, I was wondering about the pick your installation choices before 
> you  download the installation pieces. Then grab the needed package 
> groups (modular elements, such as KDE, gnome, sysadmin, games, etc:) and 
> then generating the final ISO images  before download. I'm not sure if 
> this concept could be automated from the server side or could be 
> assembled on the client side from some sort of a retriever program.

There's really not a good, sane way to do this unfortunately.  

[snip]
> This makes sense to me now, since the CDROMs are at hand. It would be 
> nice though if after the installer found a working hi-speed connection, 
> if it would present a choice for doing a network install or check for 
> errata, which might improve the installation. (Out of disk space, 
> firewire, default up2date retrieval information, etc).

Checking things like this tends to ... annoy people.  They think that
you're calling home or something :)  Also, "high-speed" is a very vague
term and hard to determine.  Plus, as soon as that's done, people start
wanting ISDN and everything else support on boot disks which starts to
get out of hand pretty quick for boot disks.  As far as updates, they're
handled in the firstboot process.

> >boot.iso is located in the images/ directory and is an approximately 4
> >meg image that you can burn to CD and start an install with.  Maybe
> >putting it in the isos directory instead of just the tree would help
> >raise the visibility here
> >
> I downloaded and tried the boot.iso from the rawhide image directory. It 
> detected a NIC presence on both machines that I tried it on. On the 
> machine with dual 3com ethernet cards, it asked which ethernet card that 
> I wanted to use. Neither came with an identity. Is kudzu and hwdata part 
> of the boot.iso?

rawhide is a little busted right now.  Now that the holidays are over,
I'll get back to tracking down why :)

> I would have found the boot.iso faster, with it being located alongside 
> the installation ISOs. I still assumed the images directory was for 
> floppy images , not CDROM images.  Live and learn!

Hmm, okay.  It's definitely something to consider.  The extra 5 megs
wouldn't really be a huge concern for mirroring, IMHO, and if it makes
things more obvious then it may well be worth it.  

Cheers,

Jeremy