“Earlier this week Microsoft finally shipped its Vista operating system, which has been receiving a fair amount of attention from traditional media sources. However, if Windows is not your thing Fedora 7 Test 1 is now out.” Phoronix has some preliminary thoughts on Fedora 7 Test 1.
I remember installing older releases of Solaris which you could run netscape while waiting for package installation to complete. And having links in Gentoo installation to read online documents was really nice.
But I cannot understand the need to integrate a “complete desktop system” with the installer. Everybody already complains about the number of CDs required, and almost an entire one is wasted for the applications which are duplicated (one for live cd, one for RPMS).
Unless they incorporate the existing binaries to installation, I’d prefer a regular setup CD, for a faster install and smaller download.
I think the benefits of a live cd are that people who would like to try a particular distribution of Linux, but may not want to blow away their existing setup to do so in case they don’t like it, will have a chance to run the full burrito before committing themselves to a switch.
It’s like test driving a car really.
I applaud Fedora’s efforts in this matter.
The thing about Distro LiveCDs is that they are all the same. The real differences between distros are package management, installation and support. None of which can be seen on a liveCD.
Thats so not true. There are several other things like application defaults, look and feel, integration etc that make a very significant amount of difference between distributions.
Even if I do take your list as the important items, package management works perfectly fine in the Fedora Live cd since it uses a setup capable of installing packages onto the live cd directly. Moreover the Fedora Live cd installer hooks into the same package management setup and installer as the normal system and works exactly the same. Support if you mean those offered on those forums and mailing lists can be easily checked by just visiting the past posts on those topics too.
How about testing for hardware compatibility? Especially when shopping for a LAPTOP you want to use with Linux! Just boot off of a recent Live CD to see what gets detected and configured properly.
Just following Ubuntu, Gentoo and many other more.
Just a way to see if you like or dislike a distro.
I will never use again a rpm-based distro (ah, rpm-hell) but live cd is a good thing.
What RPM hell are you talking about? You do realize that end users are using yum, apt-rpm, smart or whatever automatic dependency resolving package management systems and not RPM. Right?
*Sigh* That is not excuse. Obviously you have not tried the true basic package management system like dpkg and compiling from source for Ubuntu (Debian based) and Gentoo (which uses tarball format) respectively to make such statements. Not knowing how a package management system works just exposes your ignorance.
Edited 2007-02-03 22:55
It is a good thing because it allows users to try out the system without having to resize, reconfigure, or re-anything an existing computer. They also don’t have to rely on having access to another machine in order to try Linux.
If they like what they see, they install it on their machine. If they don’t, pop out the CD/DVD, reboot, and go on with life.
I like network installations, because they are generally very up-to-date and they don’t have you burn stuff on CD or DVD that you may not even end up needing.
Unfortunately, these installers are poorly marketed, and some distributions even have poor options. Suse for example makes it hard to even tell the installers which mirror you want to use, something that Debian does very well; not to mention Fedora, that manages to be very good at hiding the fact that such a thing as a Fedora netinstall even exists.
In fact, we may say that 1 CD installers like the ones Ubuntu uses are actually pretty much network installers too, if you want your own non-US locale and even a tiny number of say Qt apps if you use Ubuntu, because you end up downloading a lot while installing.
Maybe it is an idea to ‘sell’ network installers (a word that might scare some) as “broadband installers” because they are especially good for broadband internet. People would think, yeah I can use that, after all I have broadband internet. Ideally, people could boot from an .iso on a USB stick, no more hassle with CD-RW.
It probably limits bandwidth for the mirrors too, because say I want to install Suse, I first download a massive DVD, then I install, and then I update, downloading again. I may well have left more than a GB unused.
one annoyance I’ve come across with some “broadband” installers is if they don’t include anything to enable a pppoe connection making it rather trying to actually install the thing.
one network-based install method that I find fedora/redhat particularly shines at though is nfs installs. beautiful stuff. just export a dir with the ISO files in them (no need to explode them or anything), type linux askmethod at the boot prompt, choose nfs and point it in the right place and voila! very fast, convenient, etc.
http://shots.linuxquestions.org/?linux_distribution_sm=Fedora%2…
Just thinking you have to had 25 mirrors just to get as much software packages you can get with main + universe + multiverse with ubuntu.
From my own experience, I found rpm slower and bigger than deb packages.
Maybe bad distros, like FC3 or FC4 or even Mandrake 9.1 in their own times ?