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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Won't Fit On a CD
gbl08ma writes "According to various sources, the ISO image size for the upcoming Long-Term Support Ubuntu version 'Precise Pangolin' will not fit on a regular CD, since the image size is expected to weigh around 750MB instead of the usual ~700MB. The idea is that users should either flash the image to a USB flash drive or burn it to a DVD. The extra room on the disc image could allow for integration of more GNOME3 components and Canonical applications. There was also a proposal to use a 1.5GB DVD image as the default download for Ubuntu 12.04."
This is proof positive that Ubuntu is officially BLOATWARE.
what in the world is a CD? some old tech that is not pontless anymore like an 8track or VHS tape?
This might get me downrated, but honestly, I don't think Ubuntu is for everyone. I do think that Canonical wants to stay relevant with those folks who have 5 year old or younger machines.
If you need a Linux distro that fits on a CD drive, there are other options, but just about every machine in the past 5-6 years boots off a USB key or DVD drive. Some newer machines like netbooks and macbook airs don't (and have never) come optical drives (hell I have a toshiba portege from 2001 without optical media).
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If the plan to use a 1.5GB default image goes through that will wreck havoc on the mirroring network. That's essentially doubling the size of the default ISO and will likely cause for some annoyed users waiting for the download. They're doing it wrong if they can't fit it on a CD.
Because Fuck You, thats why. But then, that was pretty much always been the attitude of Linux developers when it comes to listening to users.
This is one of the many reasons why Mint is now more popular than Ubuntu.
Older hardware which (surprisingly!) still does well with Linux, but doesn't have the capability to boot from USB - that's why you would need a CD. A DVD is probably a good-enough alternative as well since DVD drives have been pretty standard for many, many years.
You only wish that was a troll.
Gone!
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
I'm using ubuntu since version 6, now 10.04 - it took some time to get audio right on my machine (fujitsu siemens Xi2428, older laptop), but one of the things I like most about linux is that once it's configured properly, it will stay that way. It will not get slower over time, or suddenly change behavior, like windows (although the last version of windows I used is XP, and still do, in Virtualbox).
I think Ubuntu 10.04 is a very nice looking desktop OS, it just works, everytime, no surprises. It's ideal for running XP in virtualbox (where it's more at home, XP is more of an application than OS, imho), and rock stable. I honestly don't know what else should be added to it.
This is ridiculous, CDs cost the same as DVDs and if your computer has a optical drive and is new enough that you should be using normal Ubuntu instead of one of its builds designed for low spec systems then you have a DVD drive (and a few gigs is nothing for a USB stick).
I have been burning CD images to DVDs for like 5+ years now, because unless you want compatibility with really old systems there is no reason not to and lets face it Ubuntu is not really even compatible with these systems in the first place.
So I cannot even imagine one person being inconvenience by this.
Now significantly increasing the size will effect download time, but once it is on a HD 700MB or 1.5G are both so insignificant that it does not really matter.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
People who need/want read-only media that can't have malware inserted into it by the CVS photo printer and other people's computers...
I like Debian's net-install to get the latest packages since stable ISOs are usually outdated. :( Obviously, if you have fast Internet connection.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My Vaio Z doesn't boot from USB. That's incredibly weird, since it's a "premium" high-spec machine, but it makes using Linux a pain in the ass. (So does their disregard of TRIM in favor of a custom SSD garbage-collection system, and their proprietary switchable graphics, and their out-of-the-box RAID 0'd SSD's, and...) It's like Sony had a serious case of NIH syndrome.
I always burned the CD ISO to DVD because it would install faster and with less noise.
I think, therefore you are.
Any system that has been made since circa 2001 (i.e. the past 10 years) has been able to boot from USB.
Ubuntu 11's system requirements are as such:
* 1 GHz CPU (x86 processor (Pentium 4 or better))
* 1 GiB RAM (system memory)
* 15 GB of hard-drive space
By Pentium 4 or better, that likely means it requires SSE2 instructions, which means Athlon 64 is the minimum on the AMD side. 1GB of RAM is hard to find or get on 2001-2002 P4's as well due to the use of RDRAM. So you're basically looking at 2003-era systems as a minimum to run Ubuntu.
But finding an 8 year old or better system as a hand-me-down, at a yard sale, or even by dumpster diving isn't difficult at all. Never really has been. Most systems like that will actually still work once the typical spyware-infested XP install is removed.
Considering a brand new 4GB USB flash drive is a whopping $2.47 on Amazon (or $5 at Walgreen's) it's not that big of a deal to get one of those either.
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Flash-Drive-SDCZ36-004G/dp/B001XURP7W/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1320470296&sr=1-3
Ubuntu made the right choice by dumping what is now an arbitrary 700MB limit. I'm sure plenty of people also "saw the light" of Linux on 1.44MB floppies in the late 90's as well, but it's almost 2012, and both eras are over now.
TLDR Ubuntu requires 2003-era systems to begin with. 4GB USB drives are $2.47 these days. No big deal.
Yeah but the problem with that is this: what's the first thing to go out on a DVD/CDRW or a DVD burner? the ability to read DVDs. I don't know how many machines I'd had through the shop that would read and burn CDs just fine but the DVD would be crapped out.
So what is wrong with giving folks choice, isn't that is what FOSS is supposed to be out, choice? Why not have a 2 CD set AND a DVD with everything but the kitchen sink, why not that?
Of course I'll probably get hate for daring to even say the user should have choice, I don't know what happened to the community but it just don't seem like a nice place anymore. Now it seems to be too many have this "You'll take this and do it our way and damned well LIKE it or STFU and go back to windblowz luser" attitude, like FOSS is an exclusive club and they're the gatekeepers or something.
I used to love keeping up with what's new and thought back in 03 that by this time we'd see Linux boxes in every store, but somewhere along the ways the ground turned sour and the community seems to me to be more about being in a club than helping FOSS spread to the masses.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Better yet, how many of us then reinstalled windows _just_ long enough to get online and figure out why Linux wouldn't partition/install/boot?
None.
Advice: on VPS providers
You have a choice. You can implement it yourself ( or wait until someone does it for you )
Really, i have been burning the Ubuntu iso's on DVD since a long time : they boot up faster than CD's .
The problem with FOSS is that everyone wants the benefits, but no one wants to be part of it. And then you complain when they don't do it the way you like it.
Slipping shoelaces ?
I've yet to see any of those do anything but set a flag the OS can (and will, if infection is your concern) ignore.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's Sony. Are you really surprised? They seem to have some kind of fetish for making their own proprietary "solutions" when better open solutions are already available. Hardly a new phenomena.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Umm, you have a choice? You can use an old release, go to a different distro (that different distro could be better targeted at old hardware even), or package up your own release (or take the released image and remove some packages to trim it down for your own needs).
In this case I don't see it making a lot of sense to make it not CD size just for 50 megabytes worth of data but I also don't think the user is entitled to ubuntu on a CD or that it's a project requirement for ubuntu.
It's not like the project is called Damn Small Linux and it suddenly requires a 32GB flash drive to install or something...
Then use Debian, use Puppy Linux, use BasicLinux, use whatever. It's your choice, whether you're running an 8-core AMD Bulldozer, a $250 netbook that leaves any 2003-era system in the dust, or something from the 1990s that belongs in a museum (or landfill).
I only wish you luck on getting any modern software, such as an ACID2-compliant browser like Iceweasel or Chromium, to run on a Pentium 1 with 48MB of RAM. Such things do not constitute Windows 98 era junkware. If you're reading this with lynx, more power to you!
That one "$2.48 for new" price you're latching on to doesn't include the $5 in shipping. View those offers taking that into account (most other sellers are free shipping) and you get $7.48, the real "street value" online.
Windows Vista was a hog, but Windows 7 will run on any system that Ubuntu does, and runs well on the same systems, although you may have to disable Aero. The Windows 8 developer preview is actually faster and uses less memory that Windows 7, but it does require a "DirectX 9" graphics card (most anything 2002+), as the graphics are 100% 3D-accelerated.
Win7 also remarkably stable from what I've seen for the past 2 years or so. It's not subject to the junk XP was, like having to run ipconfig /flushdns (or rebooting) to fix network issues. It also uses ASLR and DEP by default for base security purposes.
Because of that, there's no reason to use XP in the Windows world ofr anything except for 1990s-era software that requires IE6 or does things like write to its own C:\Progra~1\ directory. Not to mention XP considers SATA to be exotic hardware, drivers haven't been written for it for years, its PnP driver capabilities are way outdated, etc.
But whatever you're using, it's your choice, and do enjoy. Just thought I'd inform you on this from the other side of things. :)
It's about time distro makers stopped restricting their content to what they can cram within the artificial limitations of 700MB. Pretty much every desktop and laptop computer since, what, 2004 has had a DVD reader.
I've always felt that the Ubuntu DVD ISOs were a bit of an afterthought. Hopefully this will now change.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
CD's just work. Newer stuff may be nice but PCs really are not standardized in any meaningful way. Booting via USB tends to be one of those things that is spotty. Some will boot on USB but only certain USB devices (ie, hard drives and removable disk drives, but not other mass storage like thumb drives). Some PCs may do this just as a security measure. PCs are not thrown away and replaced every year either, and we've gone from thumb drives being tiny and expensive to large and cheap in less than the typical life time of a PC.
Also this is Linux. Linux is very often put on older computers that people would otherwise throw away because it won't run the latest Windows very well. Those older PCs are much more likely to not support booting from thumb drives.
and then you found out that disk #3 wasn't reading.
talk about good times.
I was going to respond "get for-pay apps in the Software Center" but then I looked and that's in there now. I just came back from Debian so I didn't know. There needs to be a lot more of these for-pay apps, and they need to not suck. Ubuntu needs commercial apps that make money, and not just a little. They need an "Angry Birds" breakout success story to bait the masses of developers needed to make a successful ecosystem. That's probably the only thing Old Sweaty was ever right about. This isn't going to be a $19.95 app. It's going to be a $1 or free app. And by free I mean "ad supported" - which brings another thing: the Software Center needs to allow ad-supported apps. Yes, I know: they suck. Especially in cases like Angry Birds, where Rovio wouldn't release a sold version on Android for forever because the ad-supported version was raking in far more per install than the for-pay version. But this is the world as it is, not the world as we want it to be, and ad-supported apps and for-pay apps pay developers' mortgages the world 'round.
When you name your versions after critters official collectible plush toys and figurines in limited editions are a profit center gimme - and they make great spiffs.
I wanted the taskbar back but I just Googled that and apparently there's something called Tint2 that gave it back to me. Then I wanted the old menu back, and Google gave up classicmenu-indicator. This Unity thing is going to take some getting used to but at least I can now do the things with it now I used to do. I'm all for trying the new stuff, but this was simplified a bit overmuch. I'm sure I'll get over it. I don't know if Google Talk video chat is supported yet - but that's also a needful thing.
I'm curious as to why if as some others here would say, "nobody uses desktop Linux", there would be about 216,000,000 hits in Google for "Ubuntu". Surely Ubuntu (philosophy) was never that popular. Maybe some marketing money to fight the perception that nobody's using it when in fact a great many are. Or maybe a guerrilla effort involving something like discreet little Ubuntu stickers with just the logo and "Ubuntu.com" that fans could buy for a couple dollars a sheet of 80 1x1" clear waterproof decals we could discreetly affix to things like windows and glass doors, armrests in aircraft and waiting areas, the pages of shared magazines, the lid of a geocache. Kind of like a "Ubuntu fan was here" stamp, but not something that did damage or was hard to remove like the bumper stickers you used to get with RedHat. Wouldn't want to get people in trouble. Thinking about it more, 3x5 cards with 60 1/2" square stickers would be better as they're more pocketable and discreet - but the website has to have a background in a contrasting color if you're doing the transparent thing because functional readability is more important than artistic purity.
Ubuntu could use a Netflix app, or maybe just an Android VM with the Android Marketplace so I can use all my Android apps in Ubuntu. I could develop Android apps on the darned thing, I don't see why I can't have a Cyanogen for Ubuntu. Then I could have all the same apps on my phone, my Transformer tablet, my PC. That would rock.
Ubuntu needs an OEM to build and ship a purpose-built line of Ubuntu PCs globally including the US. Dell is doing this in China, but Dell's not going to push this in the first world. It has to be an OEM that isn't beholden to Microsoft so HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba and Apple are out. Maybe HTC, ZTE, Samsung, Motorola Mobility or some other company that has publicly credited Android with saving the company would give it a go. Maybe AOC, LG, NEC or Viewsonic also - they want to play in the new PC game but are reluctant to do the no-margin Windows desktop thing. Some of that last bunch are cool because they also make TV's and/or monitors, and a fanless Ubuntu embedded in the monitor or HDTV would totally rock as a thin client as well as a PC. Some of them already have Android tablets. Ubuntu's b
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Slackware ships on a DVD, and a full install is about 5-6 GB. But it certainly isn't bloated. It's one of the quickest and most stable distributions I've used, so I hesitate to say that adding more stuff to the Ubuntu install justifies people calling it bloated. Ubuntu's selection of software is still conservative in quantity. If anything would be blamed on bloat, it would be implementing it in such a way that it negatively affects your system's performance. So if they're adding unnecessary things to the system startup, or a lot of background processes that you don't use, then that would be bloat. (In Ubuntu's case, this has been happening, but it started long before they ever decided to ship a release that was too large for a cd.)
The Linux kernel is only a few megabytes. The whole thing fits easily in the L2 or L3 cache of a modern server processor. That's Really Freaking Important for geeks like me who have to build stuff at scale.
I want to ignore your troll, but I can't. You raise an important issue, even if your motivations are suspect.
For 20 or 30 years we've had the meme "Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away." That's shorthand for the fact that Microsoft operating systems grow less performant at the same rate Intel processors grow more performant, and net the progress is zero. It doesn't have to be that way any more.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You still have so many choices for installing Ubuntu, that you won't find in many non-FOSS products:
- You can use the alternate text-mode Ubuntu installation CD.
- You can boot Windows and then install Ubuntu from there, using the Windows installer.
- You can install an older version of Ubuntu and dist-upgrade it in place.
- You can boot the USB image using a GRUB floppy or CD image.
- You can borrow an USB dvd reader for the first installation (hey, if you have defective hardware, you might expect to be required to have the proper tools to overcome your problems).
How hard is it to put the optional stuff on a second CD? Make sure you can run a low spec PC off the first CD and put all the higher spec stuff on the second one. People will have the choice to use either the DVD, only the first CD, or the two (or more) CDs. RedHat has been doing multiple CDs for years and years....
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
In that case, I would recommend the Plop Boot Manager:
Plop Boot Manager
As long as the system has USB ports, it will allow you to boot from them after booting this utility from CD/Floppy/Network.
Overburn is a great option, but it does _not_ work with name-brand media. Cheap CD media has a lot of overburn space because the manufacturing process is, well, cheap and the tolerances are not strict. Therefore the manufactures leave a lot of overburn space that may or may not be useful. With these you can get anywhere from 750-780 MB on a disk. The name-brand CDs are manufactured to ISO 900x specs, so they can bring the tolerances way down. You might not be able to go above 720 MB on some of these.
Note that no matter which type of disc you overburn, the end might not be readable! I hope that something nonessential is way out there on the end, and that the installer knows how to handle a non-read potion of the end of the disc.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
If they don't include Gnome 2 in the new Ubuntu version with LTS, we will see mass migration to Linux Mint. Already Linux Mint gained 40% in a single month, 'cause of the Unity & Gnome 3 debacle. I wonder when the Ubuntu decision makers are going to realise, how bad their new Desktop Environment is.
Why won't ubuntu just do as fedora has done? use xz compression on the squashfs image. The live image for fedora is now 565 MB, but would have been more than 700MB if using gzip compression as ubuntu does. Reading from cd/dvd or even flash drives and harddrives (except ssds) are so slow compared to the cpu today anyway, so it would probably be faster in most cases.
Gosh, someone sure likes to swap? I remember this kinda stuff from the days of floppies... a two floppy OS was NOT fun.
The trick for a distro has always been about supporting the old and the new. At a given point it is time to give up your 386 with its 1 speed CD player and buy a new computer. At least if you want to use a distro that has made it VERY clear that it is no longer aimed at weirdos. After all, how you are you going to run Unity on that old PC of yours?
Time to seek a new distro. One that doesn't just add a ton of bloat that can just as easily be downloaded.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This
And especially true regarding Ubuntu lately
No one in their right mind would ship Pulseaudio (amongst other things)
But of course, to hell with the user
how long until
Maybe for floppy disks, but because flash disks contain the actual hardware that performs the write, it's the firmware on the flash controller that determines what instructions it will obey, and they come from reading the state of the physical switch.
It would only be circumvented by the virus flashing new firmware onto the flash disk - and even then, the flash disk would have to have writable firmware RAM, and it'd have to be the correct type. Even more unlikely than the a BIOS virus or a DVD-ROM firmware virus.
Some stupid "encrypted" disks try tricks like software-only unlocking crap that can be circumvented, but read-only switches on flash disks are very real and very useful (and very rare, unfortunately).
A CD is the older version of a DVD that holds only 700 MB and therefore uses much less of a 5 GB/mo cap to download and burn than a CD does.
Actually you're thinking of the SD card. The SD card is a simple flash memory with a toggle switch that relies on a controller a) recognises that the card has the switch flipped to read only and b) sends a signal to the OS.
USB on the other hand is not a direct link to the storage medium, and has hardware flash controllers onboard. The more expensive ones implement this properly, the cheaper ones actually hard limit the R/W line going to the chip. The cheap solution is robust but also easily visible because the OS doesn't know it's read-only. When you try writing to the drive you end up with a weird failed message.
Any system that has been made since circa 2001 (i.e. the past 10 years) has been able to boot from USB.
Wrong. I know of some OEM boxes from the '04 era that can't, and some BIOSes from even later than that make it unnecessarily difficult - Gigabyte, IIRC, wrote its BIOS to force you to guess what kind of mass-storage your USB stick should emulate. Guess wrong and your USB stick won't boot.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Then why is the Gimp still named the Gimp?
Answer: because developers got a stupid idea, and no matter how many times the users tell them it's stupid, they won't listen. I suppose technically this isn't hating the users, but in practice the results are indistinguishable--perfectly reasonable concerns from users go unheeded.
provides features that nobody else does
There is this thing, called JACK, that both predates pulseaudio, is more stable, and provides more features.
Good luck using pulseaudio in an audio production environment.
"Like what? Using more CPU for audio than for playing a video? (yes, I did this test)"
I highly doubt that unless you're using something like VDPAU, in which case it's hardly a fair test as the CPU isn't _doing_ any video decoding.
However, it's true that PA uses more CPU time than ALSA by default; know why? Because it does higher quality resampling. Given that low quality resampling can introduce audible artifacts into your sound stream, I'm all in favour, thanks. But if you want to change PA to use the same resampling algorithm ALSA does, and hence gain 'performance' at the cost of audio quality, edit /etc/pulseaudio/daemon.conf and change resample-method from 'speex-float-3' to 'trivial'.
Why do you need to put apps, or even a WM/DE on the distribution download? Let users chose for themselves.
Debian has it right, create a plain vanilla ISO, and let users decide. Makes much sense than having a separate distro for whatever WM/DE you might want to use.
My Athlon 64 has 1.5GB of RAM, was bought in 2005 and still runs great. And it runs Wheezy, not some old crap like Windows 98 (cue some Fedora fan saying "but Debian is old crap"). Since the Phenom II/Core2, computers have grown too powerful for our simple, daily needs like viewing Wikipedia or Youtube videos. Also, my PC is far more powerful than Atom netbooks and runs circles around any ARM phone or tablet. Since everyone seems to be designing OSs with them in mind now, I'd say my old hunk of junk is pretty safe for the foreseeable future.
The problem with FOSS is that everyone wants the benefits, but no one wants to be part of it. And then you complain when they don't do it the way you like it.
That's not entirely true. I'm, for the most part, a FOSS user and I love the benefits it provides. Yet, while I want to be part of it and contribute (and i know i cant be the only one), I don't. why? I don't have neither the resources, nor the required skill set to do it. I'm definitely not rich, so hiring someone to make the mods for me is out of the question. And being a PhD student, having the time to make said implementations is out of the question, let alone learning the required languages and skills necessary to pull it off. So, i resort to the next best option: complain :-). But seriously, complaining isn't all bad - it tells the FOSS developers that there ARE people out there wanting product improvements AND how to improve the products in a way that's more marketable (OK, i differentiate between whining and constructive criticism, both of which occur in abundance). At any rate, complainers (constructive critics) DO help - just in a different way than what many hope for.