smaller & better Fedora?

[bu66le]

Hi,
Its not creative a creative question, but don't u think a smaller Fedora will benefit more people, especially those without broadband? The current 4 cds are too many to download. For users not living in US or those without credit card, online purchase will take days.

Why yum by default in Fedora? Why not apt-rpm? yum is like crap even on broadband

[JonR]

One of the good things for me about Fedora was the completeness of the distro. It came with most everything I wanted.

The point about download time for non broadband users is well made. It takes forever. Maybe there's a case for "FedoraLite"? I guess it comes down to the time it would take the Fedora team to construct, test and support another version of the distro.

Yum has its pros and cons as do all the package managers. I think you can speed things up by limiting the no. of retries in yum.conf but I haven't tried it. Is CoBind any quicker?

[kosmosik]

you always can do a minimal network install it is like 300MB download... I did it yesterday (yes, I destroyed my partitions myself, by mistake) and it took 1h on 1mbit DSL line

you can always purchase fedora. in my country it is aviable with magazine as dvd and cds and it costs like 10 euro... it is cheap.since fedora is free I am sure you can get it burned on cd from friend or from some local auction site like ebay... or contact anybody in your local user group and ask if they can provide you fedora for beer and pizza :>

[foolish]

There has been talk about making the Core smaller. This won't happen untill there is a Fedora-Extras to put the stuff you take out in. Fedora-Extras won't happen unill the developers and Red Hat are done discussing just what Fedora-Extras is supposed to be. It can be a while.


Yum is the default because when Core 1 was started, apt-rpm was doing some really nasty stuff. This was fixed about when Core 2 was released. Yum has proven to be great for everyone besides the low-bandwidth crowd, and in most cases they are perfectly capable of getting apt-rpm themselves.

Fot now, get all 4 cds some other way, If there's a linux user group around you, there is one in almost every city where there's a university, you can get CDs from them. There's magazines that have them and there's even webshops that will send you the cds for a small fee.

[Mat]

being a dial-up user myself, I really like the distribution as it is now.. sure, I never downloaded them (7kb/s is not very much.. ), but bought them online for 7 bucks...

if the distribution would be smaller, I still would need to buy the (let's say) 2 cds then, but need to spend big amounts of time to download all those stuff that was left out in order to decrease the file size...


so, I vote for letting Fedora as it is

Mat

[Jman]

I know what you mean. Calling it "Core" is a little misleading as it is more than 3 CDs. (I usually call it just Fedora anyway.) But it is complete, and I like that.

Moved to Fedora Focus.

[Ned]

I understand the argument that 4CDs is too big for the "Core" product, but there's a flip side to this. If you take packages out of the core, then they'll end up in fedora extra's or where ever, and I'm not convinced the quality/testing will be as thorough for these packages once removed from core.

You're not forced to install a lot of this "extra" stuff, so I say let it stay.

I do think the package management/groups needs some work though - there's stuff clearly present within core that's not installable via add/remove packages (which makes me wonder how long it'll stay in core) and there's stuff installed by default that really shouldn't be. But that's another thread in it's own right

Ned

[bu66le]

Wouldnt it be nice if we only need the first cd for 'core' and the rest being extra? Slackware is 2 cds, Gentoo is 2 cds and most live cds are 1 cd. They all r very functional. Completeness does not appeal to me. We can always download additional software from the net, like how we did in in m$ windows. I like the old days when we only have 2 cds for RH7.2

[Mat]

Originally Posted by bu66le

We can always download additional software from the net, like how we did in in m$ windows. I like the old days when we only have 2 cds for RH7.2

yeah, but then people like me would need to stick with mandrake or suse, where we could buy thoses boxes from...

dial-up's neither fast nor cheap here..

[Ned]

Originally Posted by bu66le

Wouldnt it be nice if we only need the first cd for 'core' and the rest being extra?

That's not a bad idea - if the installer clearly marked packages as core (CD1) or extra packages (CD2-4) then you could choose whether to download just the first CD, or all 4 CDs but RH/Fedora still retain control of the additional packages.

The best of both worlds

Ned

[crackers]

One issue with getting all the "essentials" on one CD comes to the GUI stuff: X isn't all that tiny and then you'd have to make a choice for the ONLY GUI "out of the box" between Gnome (which is the "default") and KDE, which means you're likely to make a significant amount of your target audience upset, no matter which you choose. As I've mentioned in several other threads, there are lots of trade-offs that occur during the course of choosing packages and "building" a distribution. We aren't necessarily all privy to the inputs to the decision making, so blindly double-guessing "why this" or "why that" is pretty pointless - except as a discussion topic.

The reason Knoppix and other single-CD bootable distributions can get away with it is that they've deliberately stripped the systems down to what they think are the important items, and then compressed them even more, with special drivers and kernel tweaks to use the compressed binaries.

[kosmosik]

with Fedora Core 1 I remember that there was some unofficial releases on net. containing only one CD and essential desktop stuff... the one CD was intended for testers and journalists for preview. but I think it would also fit here... but I don't know about anything like that for FC2... you can always play with anaconda/kickstart scripts to craft your own instalation media... or do a minimal network install, it is like 300MB download, still less then one ISO image. but I don't exactly understand what is a case here? Fedora is very easy to get... buy a magazine with fedora covercd, download from net - f.e. at workplace or at school, in my school we have fedora mirror localy, main server runs FC2 (BTW server hosts big (10000 users) application managing users/grades/payments etc. and serves home directories for network of 1000 hosts - now that is quite a production envirement!), you can ask your friend with broadband to download it for you, go to internet cafe and download, look for local LUG... anything. it is easy to get and it is cheap. I think complete operating system capable of doing very powerful stuff is worth this little money as few euro...

[bu66le]

Originally Posted by crackers

there are lots of trade-offs that occur during the course of choosing packages and "building" a distribution

What if:
CD 1 for the real 'core' and all the sys admin tools
CD 2 for X11, Gnome, KDE and all the pretty things
CD 3...n for 'extra'?

Sounds like a cranky idea, huh? but I believe it works...

[kosmosik]

it is somehow funny that doing "minimal install" from CD also requires all set of CDs :\ it should only be first one... this is not too smart :\ - minimal install is only about 250MB size of RPMs needed... developers could place packages in a little smarter way...

[bu66le]

Originally Posted by crackers

so blindly double-guessing "why this" or "why that" is pretty pointless

apt has 'super cow powers' while yum is 'super slow' when getting headers... no hard feeling for yum fans, ok?

Originally Posted by kosmosik

it is somehow funny that doing "minimal install" from CD also requires all set of CDs

OK, another cranky idea: all packages should be sorted by 'dependency'
CD 1 is self-satisfying
CD 2 can only depends on CD 1
CD 3 can only depends on CD 2 and 1