Offline install cd set needed!

[blackamon]

I really think that we need to make an official offline cd set available so a fast internet connection isn't a requirement anymore. In alot of countries 56k modem connections is the only thing available and downloading several MB's becomes extremely expensive and takes hours and hours to download. Gentoo shouldn't just be available for the highspeed internet community let's make Gentoo available for everyone!

just my 2 cents...
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Blackamon (David Sinclair)

"- do { life(); } while(world_exists == true); "

[nitro322]

While I think it would be a good thing, I cast my vote as I don't know because I'm not sure how it could be properly implemented. Gentoo has ebuilds for MANY programs, and usually several versions of each to take care of any dependency problems. This would take up a LOT of room on CDs (anyone have an idea exactly how much space this would require? I'd be curious to know.), which in itself would be almost as prohibitive. Also, Gentoo is, at its core, a bleeding edge distribution, constantly being updated and worked on. Creating such a static release would require masking everything for a good bit of time to make sure there are no dependencyu problems before packaging it for release. Now your shiny new Gentoo installation is immediately outdated, and you'll be right back to downloading the sources to update everything. Perhaps a single CD with sources for the base system, kernel, compiler, X, KDE, and Gnome would be a reasonable compromise. This would at least be enough to provide a fully working and capable system for newbies, and you can always upgrade and add whatever you need.

[blackamon]

thanks alot nitro322 for your reply, you brought up alot of things i haden't thought of... i hope the other ones who voted No could post some reply's too...
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Blackamon (David Sinclair)

"- do { life(); } while(world_exists == true); "

[pjp]

I voted no because Gentoo is designed around being downloaded. Also, I don't see the value in having the core team maintain .iso images. Not a bad idea, I'd rather see the team work on other areas though. Since you have to be able to download an .iso to begin with, or buy it from one of the low cost sellers, not alot of effort would be required to create your own CD for installing on other boxen.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

[markpmc]

I'm not sure. The whole point of Gentoo (atleast for me) is the world update. A CD archive would be out of date 3 days after it's burned.

Besides don't the Stage2 and 3 tarballs fill this nitch?

Mark

[neeyo]

[n0n]

The way I see it, if anyone feels like creating and maintaining something like an offline CD set, they're welcome to it, but personally I'd prefer to have the Gentoo developers proper working on other things. Gentoo is built around the concept of having fast net access available. That's just a part of the system, and if you don't have a decent net access point, I'm not sure how useful Gentoo will be in the first place - there's plenty of other distros that provide everything you need to stay off a net connection. But seriously, when X gets upgraded, or a kernel, or you decide to do an "emerge --update world" after a month, you're going to be stuck downloading for days and days anyway. (I sound like an elitist snob here, don't I? I don't mean to be, honestly.) But if someone else steps forward and puts some unofficial ISOs out, more power to 'em. :)

[Techie2000]

I agree with n0n, there are ways to create your own, but Gentoo was designed with a good internet conection in mind as something that would be important.
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"And I'm right. I'm always right, but in this case I'm just a bit more right than I usually am." - Linus Torvalds

[n0n]

Actually, this brings up something that might be a good point - I did some quick looking around, and couldn't find any solid "Minimum Requirements" anywhere on gentoo.org. That'd probably be good to have, either in the FAQ or the "About Gentoo" section. That way people will have a clearer idea of whether they should jump into it or not.

Or did I just miss it somewhere?

[sebest]

I think it would be really usefull.
This cd (or dvd) should contain the most downloaded packages, i read somewhere that there were some statistics about downloaded pacakges for gentoo.

Even if some apps would be out of date few days after the cd was burnt, most of the them would style be current.

And it's not a big problem to download small updates like openssh or apache.
But it's a big problem to download Xfree, kde, gnome...

[BradB]

I'd say that if a CD was to be made, then all it has is reasonably up-todate packages - only enough to get a kernel, X server, KDE and Gnome up and running. I think that would just fit on a single CD. Also the CD could have a portage tree that coresponds to the files on disc, so at the stage where you "emerge rsync" for the first time, you'd copy the portage tree from the CD to your disk, then all other emerges won't need to get on the net.
I think once a person has a system up and running that they can play with, they don't mind waiting for "upgrades", I've got no problem with DLing while I sleep. This is basically what I did - at work where I have broadband I grabbed any package that I thought I'd need that was over 10Mb, burned it to a CD & then installed over a 56K from stage 1. I basically saved 200Mb worth of DL time. I've since re-installed my system, the first thing I did was cp my portage tree to another disk, then blast my Gentoo. When I re-installed about the first thing I did was cp my portage tree back - it saved time on the rsync and I basically didn't have to download anything.

Brad

[pjp]

[rommel]

i did a stage3 once and ran emerge --clean rsync adn emerge -up world after that and had to diff a gazzillion files...forget that....i think the whole concept of bootstraping and emerging a current system is what makes gentoo...uh ....well thats what makes it GENTOO