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