How would you shrink Fedora?

How would you shrink Fedora?

Posted Feb 24, 2005 13:05 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033)
Parent article: How would you shrink Fedora?

What's not been explained, is why the desire not to expand to five CDs?

I'd like to see a restructuring so that there was a KDE disk and a Gnome disk - then although there would be five CDs, only someone wanting both desktops would need all five. Not sure of the package sizes, but it might also be a good idea to put all the development-related packages onto a developer disk. Folks who don't know what a compiler is would then need only three CDs.

Or - more radical - how about just one CD delivering enough functionality to run yum, plus an easy-to-use program that generates an appropriate Fedora / Fedora Extras yum.conf file for your site and/or maintains a local package cache. This should be usable pre-install as well as post-install. I rather like the idea of this being run-able on Windows as well (Windows shared folder, smbfs, local repository, no problem!) Installing a system without any net connection? Again no problem, the preinstaller should handle the creation of a locally customised set of CDs, or a full N-CD Fedora "distro" if you really want everything. Or shovelling the rpms onto a DVDR[W] or USB stick or firewire disk instead. Oh, and make the CD double as a standalone rescue CD, since there will be megabytes to spare for utilities to do things like disk repartitioning and rootkit exploit detection.

For further ideas, look at the Cygwin and MikTeX installers.

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