Re: RELEASE discs & ISO images (for future)

Hi Oliver Fromme! 

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008 17:43:29 +0100 (CET); Oliver Fromme wrote about 'Re: RELEASE discs & ISO images (for future)':

>> 7.0-RELEASE images came out with FIVE disks - disc 1 to 3 and separate LiveFS
>> and docs. What do they contain?
>  - The small "bootonly" CD contains only sysinstall. 
>    It can be used if you want to install from the network.

As it was before, I knew it.

>  - Disk 1 contains everything you need to install the base
>    FreeBSD system, as well as a few useful packages.

Yes. Which?

>  - Disk 2 and 3 just contain more packages.

I remember working CD-changer while install, yeah. Several times while
handling dependencies on first disc and second disc. Annoying.

>  - The "docs" CD only contains documentation:  Handbook,
>    FAQ and articles in various languages.  These are also
>    available online, so there's rarely a need to download
>    this CD.

It's handy for novice users to have them in base system, though.

>  - The "livefs" CD contains the usual "fixit" live file
>    system.  It is bootable on its own, so you do _not_ need
>    to download disk1 if you only want the livefs CD.

Oh, so I don't need disc1 for livefs. Slightly better.

> By the way, you can combine disk1 and the livefs image into
> a single ISO image and write it onto a DVD-R.  It won't fit
> on a CD-R disk, though, and that's the reason why the
> lifefs went onto a separate ISO image.

If use DVD, then all 5 disks should be combined to it for convenience.

>> I suspect this separation is due to sizes od docs etc. - but CD drives can now
>> handle even 700 MBs of data, and disc1 for i386 occupies only 509M, though
>> disc2 is 694M, yes.
> As you can see, disk1 + livefs is larger than 700 MB.
> The docs CD is separate anyway, which is a good thing
> because many people won't need it.

And what about removing packages from disc1 ?

>> May be it is desirable to compress docs and other base system parts with
>> bzip2 -9 instead of gzip?
> What exactly would you propose to compress?  Compressing
> the docs isn't a good idea, because then you wouldn't be
> able to read them directly from the CD.  Also, as mentioned
> above, the docs are already on a separate CD.

Ideally, I want one combined disc1 + livefs + docs on a single disc1 CD.
This can be achieved by: changing compression from gzip to bzip2 -9 for
base system parts, and moving packages from disc1 to disc2. The latter has
additional benefit of reducing CD-changing annoyance for user during install.

There is also another idea to above: compress parts of livefs and/or docs
on disc1 with geom_ugz, as it is read-only anyway. This is how done in Frenzy
LiveCD from as old as 5.2.1-R times, allowing to fit entire base system and
several packages on 200MB miniCD.

>> P.S. And may be it is good also to resurrect miniinst disk for
>> Depenguinator project? :)
> Do you mean the "bootonly" CD?  It's already there.

Nope, "miniinst" as it was in 5.3, a 300-meg image with base-system only,
allowing to install without network, as "bootonly", but ports should be
installed from network - handy if ports are not needed.

-- 
WBR, Vadim Goncharov. ICQ#166852181       mailto:vadim_nuclight_at_mail.ru
[Moderator of RU.ANTI-ECOLOGY][FreeBSD][http://antigreen.org][LJ:/nuclight]