[CentOS-devel] LiveCD suggestion

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.
>
> 1.  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.

> 2. 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

> At least in your case, Wolfy, I know you are a 
> 'knight geek of the round table'.  You no longer need to work 
> on side tools for free to prove your mettle ;)
>   
I do not want to prove anything. I just want a better experience for 
users. And for myself.
And in this particular case, we talk about allowing potential users to 
have a better experience by allowing them to use the LiveCD as install 
CD ( by doing exactly what the netinstall / CD1 do). 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.


PS: the above paragraph was written even I still wear my BOFH jacket.