Re: Red Hat: why 6 CDs to install

Sam wrote:
Yugo writes:

I've read here and there that it's really preferable to have all CDs in hand before installing. Same for Suse, BTW. With most distros, you need at the most 2 CDs. You can install Debian's 21 CDs from Knoppix's single CD and all of Ubuntu fron a single CD too. Are all CDs really needed to make a RH install, say with KDE?


Most likely. Nobody really cares, because pretty much everyone has a DVD drive, these days, and almost everyone uses a single DVD image for the install.

Maybe... I'm not lucky. My goddamned computer just won't give up and I thought maybe I'd wait for hd-dvds to come out at a decent price, most probably with a new computer, and skip the DVD phase.

Is there any advantage to this way of doing things or does Red Hat needlessly insists on keeping its mirrors busy?

Not exactly. Red Hat/Fedora does not care, because a single-image DVD install is the way to go these days.

This is weird. Debian insists that people do net installs and use jigdo to reduce bandwidth consumption, and Red Hat does just the opposite.

CDs are still offered, you know. I suppose it means people use them, and having to download, burn and recheck 6 CDs is a real chore.

Why is it that only Red Hat and Suse, the two most important commercial Linux ventures, work this way? I suppose that the mirrors that offer their free products are not receiving any money from them, so why overload them completely needlessly? I'm sure I could find all I need on 2 CDs, maybe then downloading 2 or 3 extra softwares. And it's probably the same for 90% of Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS / Suse users.

I'm not advocating requiring users to do complete net installs, like OpenBSD does, for instance, but having to downloads 6 CDs still seems completely ridiculous to me. What's the logic behind this?

Strange... Do you understand that, for a new user, those questions that never receive answers, those black holes, are a put off? Why does everybody insist that asking straight questions is trolling?

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: how many CDs for v3.1 r3?
    ... for a download, I found out that I would need to download 18 CDs: ... The packages are sorted by popularity: ... A "complete" install of all packages is impossible. ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Re: Linux on Pentium 100
    ... BTW I had forgotten to state where to download them, ... Full CD set is 15 CDs. ... Download the first 2 or 3 CDs of the full CD set and install from ... or Download edition DVD, but considering that Download edition DVD is ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: FC5: software install problems
    ... keep grabbing files from ftp mirrors instead of my CDs. ... picked OpenOffice and some other stuff, ... Well it found all the dependencies on the net, and started to download ... Is there a way to use the GUI installers to install programs from the CDs ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Download (I Think) Question
    ... patch time, not to mention I'm not entirely sure where my CDs are. ... I can go to and download. ... The Lich king DVD will install all previous game content, ...
    (alt.games.warcraft)
  • RE: Updating via the web
    ... etc. are interrupting the download. ... The last time I had a really slow connection like that (56k modem) it ... download good copies of the 3 CDs. ... about 45 minutes to do a normal install directly from CD. ...
    (Fedora)