[WBEL-devel] WBEL4 progress update

[Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 05:39:15PM -0600, John Morris wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 16:57, Jesse wrote:
> 
> > In my experience, a slim DVD drive is about twice the cost of a slim 
> > CDROM. Granted, we're talking about $30 here.
> 
> That is a stat I hadn't run into.  That would certainly make me pick CD
> for a machine that will probably only use the drive to install, which is
> the case for most 1U rackmounts.
> 
> > I actually don't have CDROMs on the vast majority of machines as well. I 
> > do network installs, and so, for that, DVD would probably work fine. 
> > But I still think it makes the most sense, if you're only going to 
> > distribute in one media format, to use the one with widest usage. No?
> 
> Well I got to pondering it after noticing a) how easy it was to get a
> DVD iso out of the existing tools and b) how much easier it was to deal
> with one DVD instead of a half dozen CDs during testing of Respin2 and
> now with WBEL4.  Burned an i386 and x86_64 DVD, stuck em in a standard
> issue double DVD keepcase that was laying around and blammo, compact and
> convienient working copies.  Then of course I burned both CDs and DVD to
> circulate out in the stacks.
> 
> > If we're going DVD, why not dual-layer DVD? The cost is only a little 
> > more... Blu-Ray anyone?
> 
> Well because that isn't needed yet is why.  Even WBEL4 only weighs in at
> 4.0GB for a DVD.  And with 4 is where the issue starts to get more
> interesting.  WBEL3 is 3+3, WBEL4 is 4+4 and I'd expect WBEL5 to be 5+5
> or worse.  So DVD is coming, the only real question is when.  We are
> already at the point where the cost to manufacture a set of media is far
> less with DVD and the hassle factor with shuffling CDs is growing.  We
> are heading towards the 'horror of installing Slackware from floppy'
> situation unless at some point we all 'just say no' to bloat.  That is a
> rant for another place & time though.  :)
> 
> RH doesn't offer them yet so they don't think the time is right and from
> the feedback it is certain it isn't time to go DVD only here.  I hadn't
> went looking at what was actually shipping so I didn't know a lot of
> x86_64 hardware was still going out the door without DVD read ability. 
> I had assumed that since they were all fairly new that almost all of em
> would at least read DVDs.
> 
> Now I guess the best answer is to feature a conspicious link to a script
> to make a DVD from the CD set. Chris Kloiber's script looks like it
> would do the job so long as you have plenty of space down /tmp.

http://strange.nsk.pt/mine/mkiso.x86 does it for me. The only space it
uses in /tmp is for the isolinux directory and discinfo file.

Usage: mkiso.x86 rhel-4-i386-%.iso 4 rhel-4-i386-DVD.iso RHEL-4 md5
       mkiso.x86 <template for finding isos> <number of isos> \
                 <output file> <label> [<implantmd5?>]

Regards,
Luciano Rocha

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