My greetings to the entire community of Gentoo Developers. I would only like to state that in order to have a proper operating system become widely acceptable, you must make it easier for new users to access its distrubution channels. It is a very nice idea to have such a meta distribution as your own, and to have all these custom made features because it uses all the resources our hardware has. There is a problem though. The absence of at least ONE official downloadable CDROM from your sites. Not every user can have access to your "vendors" like Tux or Cheapbytes. Not every user has access to a FAST CABLE LINE. Several countries are still on 56k mainly because of cost. Or several people cannot afford to spend hours in downloading the files without being able to get a good look and fast on the system. Think of this too : If you are honestly considerating the fact of having an enterprise like structure and develop a strong commercial model (based on support I hope), you are probably move to the server market too. I do not think that many IT departments would care enough to even consider Gentoo as nothing but a toy should not they be able to test it fast and see how it works. It is possible allready to make a cdrom using some hacks. You could either post your own recipe on this subject, or provide a basic 1 BOOTABLE CDROM as a downloadable edition. There is no need to have the sources precompiled. The portage system is designed to grab the sources from the cdrom and compile them on the fly i presume. Consider the fact that there is another way to gain over this: Many linux magazines offer download editions of other distros. Guess which ones are all people getting, mostly new users : REdHAt and M<andrake. That is not fair. Should you consider my proposals, you wil lsee that eventually you are the ones to benifit fomr all of this. Thank you.
A net-less gentoo install, I guess
"""It is a very nice idea to have such a meta distribution as your own, and to have all these custom made features because it uses all the resources our hardware has.""" This requests *a* CD which has at least the contents of the stage1-CD plus as much sources as possible too. A reasonable minimum in my eyes would be: all sources stage3 needs (no point to discuss, it is required!) plus X, Gnome *and* KDE. If not Gnome *and* KDE are fitting on one CD, I'd vote for dropping both to avoid the impression that Gentoo favours one of them and to include a simpler environment like XFCE instead. As long as emerge has no features to request sources from removable media and to request a media change if needed, only one such source is manageable easily. This is why i write "a CD" and not CDs. But with the limit of making *a* CD, it should be easy with existing tools. How much will fit on such a CD? I cannot guess that. Starting with a world file that contains all wishes, "emerge -ef" plus the emerge -f glibc will be the answer presented in the distfiles dir (assumed it was empty before these commands). Why stage1? Thats the required minimum and including stage2 or stage3 would mean to be processor specific again and will only waste precious space that is needed for the sources. """There is no need to have the sources precompiled. The portage system is designed to grab the sources from the cdrom and compile them on the fly i presume.""" Basically ok, but see above because of the limits that with the current emerge command all has to fit on one CD if you wish to keep it simple (no manual copying of sources from multiple CDs). """I do not think that many IT departments would care enough to even consider Gentoo as nothing but a toy should not they be able to test it fast and see how it works.""" This sentence does not imply that it *must* be a source distribution. Imagine a CD with precompiled packages. If such a CD would be built for i586, the majority of systems would be able to use it and for a fast demonstration of Gentoo it would be up and running in minutes. Yes!!! Minutes!!! Using precompiled packages i can make a stage1-to-stage3 transition in less then 10 minutes on my old k6/500 system. The changes to the bootstrap process are minimal and trivial! And for bringing Gentoo to a wider audience, such a "binary CD" would be more suited in my eyes because owner of slower systems would not have to compile for days. And please dont overestimate the "optimization" things. Time is money and most IT departments will not optimize Gentoo for each different system individually. A faster machine mostly will be cheaper than wasting manpower on the question of how to save some milliseconds by optimizing binaries. And USE vars like -X are neat for someone who has more time than money but my experience @work ist that i easier get bigger harddisks than the time to think about such optimizations... In fact I vote for having both types of CDs and for extending emerge to have some means to cope with removable media for getting the sources. I'd like to see such an extended emerge and a set of CDs with all packages precompiled and all sources. That would be the breakthru for spreading Gentoo!
*** Bug 5024 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This will be/is addressed by the "Gentoo Reference Platform" that will be part of Gentoo Linux 1.4_rc2 (released around 25 Dec 2002) and all further releases.
Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux". I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers, this is the only reasonable way to do this.
