Good-bye CD/DVD [LWN.net]

Good-bye CD/DVD

Posted May 24, 2012 6:36 UTC (Thu) by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
Parent article: Moving on

For all the PCs I installed in the past three years I exclusively used the Debian netinst (network installation) image (~ 230 MB) on an USB memory stick. Mainly because modern notebooks don't have a CD/DVD device anymore. In the case of netinst, one needs to use either a Debian repository or ones own repository during install. If network is not available or desirable using installation, one can easily put the first Wheezy DVD (~3.7 GB) on a 4GB (3.60€) memory stick.

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Good-bye CD/DVD

Posted May 25, 2012 10:09 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

Yes. Same here. I think USB stick/SD card can reasonably be considered the default installation method these days. And it would be nice if USB-creator from Ubuntu made it into debian to make that easier for newbies.

See ITP bugs for why it hasn't in last two years (needs a rename a a few bugfixes).

At least we have dropped floppies - I just worked out that a full floppy set of Debian would be a little under 32,000 floppies :-) That's quite a stack. Even 71 CDs is quite hefty. It was 13 when I got involved (potato), and the proportion of available software that is packaged has probably decreased in that time.

Good-bye CD/DVD

Posted May 28, 2012 13:20 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

But the new CD/USB images are great! All CD images are isohybrid: they work for a CD and for a USB key, so the only thing that needs doing is a dd command. I contend in jest that mere mortals who cannot issue that command are not worthy of Debian.

Good-bye CD/DVD

Posted May 28, 2012 17:16 UTC (Mon) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

There are indeed very nifty. I used one last week.

However they are x86 only, so far as I know, which is a limitation. I don't know if that can be fixed (as I don't know how it works).