On 11/29/2010 06:16 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote: > On 11/27/2010 09:10 PM, Douglas McClendon wrote: >> If you want fast, nothing beats a LiveCD/USB, particularly the way >> fedora's livecd-tools does it (dd fs copy, with my convoluted dm > > thats not true. A bare metal install will finish before your livecd has > finished booting. I have c5/node's build in just under 270 seconds from > machine powerup - usb/optical media just cant shift data fast enough to > first boot an environment then kickup an installed. Sure, pedantically you are no doubt correct even though I have no idea what a 'bare metal install' means in this context. > > ok, things might have changed in fedora13+; but I'd still like to see it > being done. no, I'm not talking anything that new, just standard f8 and onward. > >> optimization). If you want super-fast, throw a rebootless installer >> (zyx-liveinstaller) on top of that. Oops, I just willfully spammed the > > .. and you lose any/all management ability from the standard > distro-aware tools. Ofcourse, that does not matter if you don't need > those tools anyway. Also here I don't really know what you mean. Though yes, LiveCD installations are presently still less flexible in several ways than the traditional installer. I was just pointing out that they are also more flexible in several ways, and my rebootless installer takes both sides of that even further. I didn't mean to suggest abandoning the traditional installer. I mean I am crazy, but not _that_ crazy :) I do believe however that when most people compare a traditional DVD install, or even the fanangled traditional DVD image on usb boot media, to the LiveCD/DVD/USB method, with or without my novelty rebootless alternative, they will find the experience to be drastically speedier (at least in many cases). Simply because writing 10K files to a filesystem takes a lot longer than dd'ing a filesystem image. (and invoking rpm to install all of them, and other steps, etc...) But I'm sure there are many use cases outside my knowledge which you are presumably referring to which are speedier still, and the right choice for some situations but not others. What I see however, is a LiveUSB that boots purty darn fast, and allows installation purty darn fast. In fact, I envision a LiveUSB image that acts pretty much like most LiveUSB's you are familiar with, but which may also have a bootloader option to take you straight into the afore-described minimal ssh/yumable state in just a couple minutes, without even requiring any subsequent reboot before attaining fully operational production state. But what I'm describing are things I'd like to experiment with building, and present as experimental options and ideas to this list in the future. Absolutely off-topic as far as the obvious priority #1 of this list at the moment. So... never mind for now. -dmc