[CentOS-devel] LiveCD suggestion

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 06/05/2010 05:23 AM, R P Herrold wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, Manuel Wolfshant wrote:
>
>   
>>> in addition to improving docs, it would also be quite cool to
>>> pre-populate the questions asked by the netinstaller with same sane
>>> defaults.
>>>       
>
>   
>> As far as I have seen while being in #centos, most beginners' questions
>> (in the context of netinstall) were more or less similar to "what should
>> I put in the 'mirror' and 'path' fields ?". Can we patch anaconda so as
>> to prepopulate those two without overloading any particular mirrors
>> (maybe using somehow the output of mirrorlist ) ?
>>     
>
> Anaconda is not Debian's netinstall approach, lacking retries, 
> invisible remote archive failovers, and diagnostic logging 
> comprehensible to said newbies. Additionally, Debian avoids 
> much of the mirror skew issue by staging updates to a daily 
> lump, and having much better 'apt-get update' detail coherency 
> as a result.
>
> The next question in #centos from beginner is 'why did my 
> install across the internet fail' and
>
> If they are only willing to D/L one CD, let it be CD 1, and 
> devote effort to grafting in a 'minimal install' option tha 
> has all dependencies at hand [more on this in a mement as to 
> '6]
>
> Otherwise you all are in the business of inventing a robust 
> paralle local media install method beside anaconda
>   
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 loose users and .. well, they still 
come to me for support :)