User Feedback on Fedora CD and DVD Writing Guide

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 20:44 +0300, John Babich wrote:
> 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.

I can't figure out what this last paragraph means.  To what "man's page"
is he referring?  Can you give more details?

> 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."

Wow, it only gets worse for Windows users.  So glad I escaped that trap
years ago. :-)  But in any case, if someone has these applications
available, what I really need to improve this doc is testing help --
that means someone who can (1) use the English language in a manner
sufficient to give me detailed and relevant information on how this
works for an app he has installed, and (2) can test directions without
variance and offer appropriate feedback.

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

Well, I'm glad it has a happy ending, for sure!  However, it would be
more useful if I had more details than the above.  I don't have any of
these OM-burning applications at my disposal, so I rely purely on the
input of equipped contributors to deliver any fixes or solutions.  If
your friend would like to file a bug and enter a dialog with me that
way, I'm all for it!

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