Single CD Fedora distro

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, Joshua Wulf wrote:

> Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> > That's exactly what I'd like to do.
> >
> > However, there's two types of CD -- Live CD and Single Install CD.  I'm
> > happy to solicit the completion of KDE and Gnome Live CDs for Fedora --
> > but the Single Install CD is another matter.  The more I investigate, the
> > more it appears as though we've painted ourselves into a corner with 
> > firstboot; basically, FC4 is *just too big* (allegedly) to install happily 
> > from one CD.  I'm still trying to get a good answer as to why this is.
> >
> > --g
> >
> >   
> I'll look into it too. If first boot is too big for a single install CD, 
> then firstboot has to go, because the Holy Grail of the single install 
> CD must be attained....

Well, there are a bunch of issues.  Mainly:

  1. The *right* approach is to alter Anaconda so that the first CD
     has a good basic install, and that you can just download CD 1 of
     4/5/20/a zillion and pick the basic 1-CD install from Anaconda.
     This work is ongoing as we speak, and apparently has an even
     money shot of making it into FC5.

  2. Language support is the bear, and if you end up building 1-CDs,
     you need to be sure that you have all the appropriate language/
     font/input mechanism code on that 1 CD.  And that 1 CD might very
     well be different for Indic languages, for instance.

So.  If someone -- anyone -- has the time to build out a 1-CD community
version of FC4 with Indic language support, that would be great.  If we
want a 1-CD Indic language CD, we need someone in India to step up and
help us.  Will it be "official"?  Dunno.  There may be some politics about 
mirrors -- but if we can manage to get it on the torrent with a tracker in 
India, maybe that's a possibility.

> I'm speculating here because I'm not yet up on the live CD status, but 
> would a single install disk, while worthy in it's own right, be a 
> significant launching pad to a live CD?

Actually, it's kinda the other way around.  Live CD is an ideal way to 
play with a good package set that fits in about 700k, and knowing which 
packages are the right ones is a large part of the battle.

--g

_____________________  ____________________________________________
  Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have
 Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent.  the
             Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the 
                     ] [ dumb.  --mcluhan