Jack Wallen of TechRepublic tried the Mandriva 2008 Spring and his verdict is "Mandriva Spring 2008 Live CD better than most other distributions fully installed." He claims that "This is, without a doubt, the finest release of any Linux distribution I have ever experienced in my 10+ years of using Linux."
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Member since:2006-01-09
Why the hell not? What else would you be doing during an install, but installing the OS? WTF if it takes up even 4 GB during the install? 99.9999% of users would care less.
I believe that the parent poster meant that no installer on this Earth should EVER require such amount of resources to perform a freaking install(!). While I will concede that few machines - if any - are sold with less than 512 Mb of RAM these days, there was a time that one could use a graphic installer with as little as 128 Mb of RAM and distros like Slackware still use the good old text-based installer that will run on even less powerful machines and get the job done the same way. It also reminds me that the Windows XP installation procedure on a brand new machine is text-based to a certain extent and the GUI installer that comes after that doesn't really need such horsepower to run (actually, it will work on pretty modest machines - credit should be given where credit is due).
Go ahead and tell me that I'm not following the times but it wasn't that long ago that early Ubuntu releases were using the old Debian ncurses installer (2004-2005?) but were still praised as a God gift and many still managed to get it installed easily.
I like the approach that many distros have been taking lately: use the Live CD as a demo that can also work as an installer but also offer the proper installer that works regardless of the Live CD option during boot...
Member since:2005-07-06
"I believe that the parent poster meant that no installer on this Earth should EVER require such amount of resources to perform a freaking install(!)"
The problem is that he just plucked the number out of the air. Mandriva One certainly doesn't need 1GB to boot (and hence install) - I think we cite 256MB but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked in 128MB or 192MB. I don't think any other live CD installer needs anything like 1GB either - I'd expect them all to have requirements similar to ours. Our old-skool installer needs I think 96MB minimum these days (the limit is the size of the installer application itself, which has to be loaded entirely into memory - we used to be able to get by with 64MB, but it's kinda grown since then).
Edited 2008-08-06 15:45 UTC
Member since:
2005-09-13
//The point is, a fracking installer should never ever ever ever need over 1GB of RAM. //
Why the hell not? What else would you be doing during an install, but installing the OS? WTF if it takes up even 4 GB during the install? 99.9999% of users would care less.