Introduction to a new SIG for creation of Live DVD

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 10:07:46PM +0530, Aditya Patawari wrote:
>    I was just reading the mails about the Fedora print magazine. There
>    Paul Frields said that "In the longer term we really do want to move
>    away from the Install DVD to a Live DVD that has more
>    relevant applications and content". We didn't had any SIG for creating
>    Live DVD and Live DVD spin. So I have started the same. The main motive of
>    the SIG will be to roll out one live DVD per fedora release which will
>    have all the packages of live cd and other packages as suggested by the
>    community. For this to be a success, community support is very much
>    required. Interested contributors please join the SIG at
>    [1]https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/LiveDVD .� Any kind of suggestions
>    or pointers are most
>    welcome.

To clarify, what I was talking about was the fact that the
Installation DVD is really just a continuation of what has shipped
since time immemorial in Red Hat Linux many years ago.  It doesn't
have any particular target.  At the same time, our Live CDs are highly
constrained by a combination of (1) the 700 MB limit, and (2) our
desire -- a worthy one, IMHO -- to keep them usable in as many
languages as possible.

So whenever we talk about media that includes a bunch of applications
that users do really want, but we can't include on a CD-sized medium,
we fall back to the DVD, which loses much of the appeal of the Live
image.  I think the Desktop SIG has already been discussing the need
for a larger image due to constantly having to bump out useful
applications to stay under the CD size limit.  At the same time, the
Installation DVD does provide a helpful testing bed for Anaconda.

Mainly, I was just interested in the idea of existing SIGs feeling
empowered to produce their Live spins for larger media, rather than
everyone needing more applications having to fall back to the
Installation DVD.  I'm not sure what an equally untargeted generic
Live spin really achieves, but at the same time, if there are
contributors interested in producing one, our spin process certainly
permits it.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug