User Feedback on Fedora CD and DVD Writing Guide

[John Babich]

To Whom It May Concern (especially stickster):

A computer-savvy friend of mine downloaded the DVD ISO and needed to
burn a bootable DVD to install Fedora 8. (He finally had enough of
Windows XP and Windows Genuine Advantage, but that's another story.)

I pointed him to the "Fedora Guide on Burning CDs and DVDs", my
paraphrase of the title.

Here's his feedback:

"OK, now coming to you from a Fedora 8 system using a Firefox web
browser. At least a few things are familiar! I think I've figured out
the problems a bit better now.

The application Fedora recommends to write bootable files is
hard-coded to use CDs. If you follow the links on the man's page, you
can see where his Vista release is where he started supporting DVDs.

The other applications, Nero, Roxio, HonestSoft and several others
also had some hard-coding inside. Specifically, they assumed a 3.2GB
file must be a video and it modified the format to something
appropriate for delivering video data but was no longer bootable.
They also assumed that if a bootable DVD was wanted, the information
to be written was very small. They would not write the file in UDF but
instead used some other format which in turn, did not support files
over 2GB. Obviously this resulted in an error code followed by exit."

I hope this is useful. At least this story has a happy ending. :-)

Best Regards,

John Babich
Volunteer, Fedora Docs Project