CD and DVD ISO images

[Ed Greshko]

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.

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.

-- 
Be incomprehensible.  If they can't understand, they can't disagree.