[RFC] unified i386/x86_64 install media.

[Casey Dahlin]

On 11/24/2009 02:50 PM, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> I was thinking and thought id get an idea out there.
> 
> rather than ship 2 dvds one for i386 and one for x86_64  we would ship one dvd 
> that has the package set for both arches.  they would likely only have the 
> packages for a desktop install on them we would need to have both arches under 
> 2.4GiB, you could choose your own adventure by enabling the everything repo.
> 
> this way you could carry a usb key or dvd that you can plug into any intel 
> based machine and be sure of having it installable. this would end the 
> discussions of what arch to promote we have a single install media.
> 
> syslinux would need to be able to detect the arch to install and likely also 
> have a flag to force 32 bit we could easily implement the 64 bit kernel and 32 
> bit userland idea that was put forward a few releases ago.  pungi will need to 
> learn how to make the new iso. but i think it is achievable. 
> 
> I think we should also push the netinstall.iso along with kickstarting 
> machines.  we could make a single netinstall.iso for both arches as well.  it 
> would make it ~375MB iso. 
> 
> Dennis
> 

I know there's still a lot of users who install on computers with no/unreliable internet access, and they're definitely worth going the extra mile to support given where that use case tends to pop up, but I still wonder if this is worthy to be "default" anymore. Shipping netinst.iso by default would be a good way to do what Dennis describes without all the pain of trying to squeeze the arches down.

--CJD