livecds in the future

[Simon Andrews]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 11/24/2009 02:21 AM, Ben Williams wrote:
>> If release engineering would like to release liveusb.iso for people to
>> use to install or just to look at the new features, that is fine But
>> from the #fedora channel the # of people installing off of the livecd
>> images are very high (if you want to search the logs i am sure they can
>> be provided, and yes the # installing useing the livecd.iso on usb is
>> high as well.)
> 
> Have you done a survey asking if a 1 GB Live image won't satisfy their
> needs?

To reverse the question - has there been any solicitation of feedback 
about how many people would be adversely affected by this change?  This 
is the first I'd heard of it.

I appreciate the desire to put more content on the default desktop spin 
and think it would be a good thing to be able to include this sort of 
material, but please be aware that this will adversely affect a number 
of users (actual or potential) of fedora (and no I can't tell you how many).

To give you a couple of scenarios for uses this will affect:

1) Plenty of hardware being used today doesn't support booting from USB 
and doesn't have a DVD drive.  I've seen many of these machines turned 
over to using linux after grinding to a halt running other OSs.

2) Plenty of people don't have a network conection or bandwidth cap 
which would allow them to do a live install.  Even my ADSL connection in 
the UK wouldn't be able to do this.

Anyone with a combination of problems 1 and 2 is now unable to easily 
install F13+.  Before discarding the idea of CD images all together 
would it not be worth finding out how many users this might affect?

The other problem I would have is that I give away plenty of CDs. 
They're dirt cheap and it's easy to have a few lying around to 
distribute when necessary.  I'm not about to start giving away USB keys 
instead.  On a larger scale I've been involved with Software Freedom Day 
where we distribute hundreds of CDs of free software.  We couldn't 
afford to move to DVDs (because of cost, time to burn and coverage of 
hardware) so Fedora would have to be removed from the list of discs our 
group distributed.

I'm all for having the USB image as well, but if there's any way to keep 
a live CD then some of us would really appreciate it.

Thanks for listening

Simon.