Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
On 06/06/2010 09:06 PM, R P Herrold wrote:
On Sun, 6 Jun 2010, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
True. But it's already quite difficult for me to explain why all other major Live CDs have NTFS and mp3 support out of the box; the additional lack of install support proved more than once the drop which made colleagues of mine to choose Ubuntu as distro for home usage, despite being familiar with Centos from work. Yes, I know, the first reaction is "their loss". But it's a pity we lose users and .. well, they still come to me for support :)
I still don't see any of this this as valid reasons.
- NTFA and mp3 - patents are and remain clear blockers to
the upstream, and CentOS at its supported core, is a slavish rebuild of its upstreams publicly available sources ...
100% correct and I am not going to debate on this issue. The only fact that I want to emphasize, from my personal experience is that the end users do not care about patents. (And around here, most of them do not care about licenses either, but that's food for another thread). What they aim is to have a good "experience". I cannot " sell " them our LiveCD as recovery tool for their damaged Windows systems when the CD lacks NTFS support. So guess what ? We go either ultimatebootcd or... ubuntu.
I do not think that the official CentOS LiveCD should provide software packages that are not present in the official repository. Doing such a thing would be misleading for the end-user.
- You hold the ability to say: Sorry, as it is not CentOS, I
cannot freely support it, any more than I would freely support any other closed source product. Would you like an estimate for my anticipated support time costs?
Theoretically that is correct. In practice in 25 years I've never ever attempted to charge my coworkers even when helping them with personal [computer related] issues
I produced documentation about how to create a LiveCD. Adding features like NTFS, mp3 or Flash support is rather simple. However, I do not want to be involved in a patent case on my free time. I have better things to do. If someone wants to involve himself/herself with the task of supporting a CentOS 'plus' LiveCD, then I would gladly offer assistance. Up to now, it didn't receive such offers.
I also seldom get requests from end-user to help them customize a LiveCD for their particular needs. While I offer them help for a fee, I do not feel like being non-supportive. Helping the whole Internet community for free is something else than giving free support to my coworkers.
From my point of view, the patch suggested by Z00dax should be added to all 3 discs. Yes, I know, under certain circumstances ( way too often unfortunately) network installs are painful and people come crying on IRC (and probably on all other avenues of help, too). But I strongly think that ditching the network install is not the answer. The answer is to properly document the problems (and the answers) and helping the users out of their problems.
A rather simple documentation about the LiveCD network installation option is published with the release notes: http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOSLiveCD5.5
Maybe a new thread could be created in centos-docs to point the need for a better documentation about the network installation process in general?
-- Patrice