[CentOS-devel] LiveCD suggestion

Mon Jun 7 14:30:27 UTC 2010
Patrice Guay <patrice.guay at nanotechnologies.qc.ca>

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.
>>
>> 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.
>
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.

>> 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
>
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