Debian Wheezy To Take Up 73 CDs Or 11 DVDs

[AJenbo]

Actually, it's 35.915 floppies. 3.000 floppy disks only contain 4GB.

Yes, this comment serves no real purpose whatsoever... :-P

I thought that number looked wrong But does Debian support splitting deb's or would you have to split them and then splice them to you hard drive before installing?

P.s. what ever happened to 2.88MB floppies?

[devius]

Actually, it's 35.915 floppies.

I'm almost sure that when the install got to 99,9% the last sector of the last floppy would be unreadable and the whole installation would abort...

@curaga I almost forgot about that! I think I managed to format some floppies with 1,72MB back in the 90's but I think there were some consequences to that. Can't remember what it was. I'm glad floppies died a long time ago

@AJenbo I never saw a drive that was compatible with them, although all my PCs had that option in the BIOS. Come to think of it I never even saw a 2,88MB floppy for sale.

[AJenbo]

I still know a company that uses floppies as a backup medium for there accounting....

[disi]

I still know a company that uses floppies as a backup medium for there accounting....

Just yesterday we 'cleaned' up the backup safe, tons of 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch floppys
We kept them... who knows, we still got some USB floppy drives (but only 3.5 inch ones)!

[locovaca]

Swap storm -> install times measured in the hours -> user abandons install and consequently Debian.

User who is installing on a machine with 64 megs and expects it to perform like it's 1999 -> is a moron -> Debian probably doesn't need him anyway

[Jonno]

Debian packages are an ar archive (same as static libraries), containing 2 compressed tarballs: the first has metadata, the second has the package content. I think they want to move from tar.gz to tar.xz for these two tarballs.

Actually, the first tarball is always gz-compressed for compatibility, the second may be compressed using gz, bzip2, lzma (deprecated) or xz.

The current default is still gz, as the package must explicitly pre-depend on an appropriate dpkg version to use anything else (>=1.10.24 for bzip2, >=1.13.25 for lzma and >=1.15.6 for xz). As the oldest still supported dpkg version (1.15.8.12 in squeeze) fully supports xz, the discussion is about dropping that requirement and making xz the default.


Also please note that the default for gz and bzip2 is to compress using -9, but the default for lzma and xz is to compress using -6, so unpacking an xz-compressed deb will only require 9 MiB RAM, not the 64 MiB RAM mentioned several times in this thread. That means that Debian would require approximately 32 MiB RAM to install, which I don't think is too onerous, especially considering that the official hardware requirement already is 64 MiB.

[smitty3268]

Swap storm -> install times measured in the hours -> user abandons install and consequently Debian.

Distro optimized for machines with < 64MB memory over normal machines that 99.9% of the user base will have -> user abandons and consequently installs a better distro.

See how that works? Everyone gets to pick what works best for them.

[Ex-Cyber]

Is that with the 1.44mb standard

There actually is no 1.44MB standard. The format that term refers to is 512 bytes/sector * 2880 sectors, which only comes out to 1.44 MB if you think that 1KB = 1024B while 1MB = 1000KB.

[curaga]

Distro optimized for machines with < 64MB memory over normal machines that 99.9% of the user base will have -> user abandons and consequently installs a better distro.

See how that works? Everyone gets to pick what works best for them.

Okay, now you're just trolling. Equating bloat = better simply is not true. Bloat does not equal more pretty, more speed or more features. If the distro optimized for 64mb does exactly the same using less memory, how is that distro worse?

That's right, it isn't.

[RealNC]

P.s. what ever happened to 2.88MB floppies?

The real reason the format didn't make it is anyone's guess. Most probably it was due to the high price of media (four times the price of a 1.44 disk) and incompatibility with some controllers (meaning that you could buy such a drive, but it wouldn't work when you put it in your PC if you had an older controller.) And this meant that software wasn't offered on such disks, since the vendors wanted to be as compatible as possible. It's a vicious cycle: software comes in 1.44MB disks, so you don't need to buy a 2.88MB drive. People don't buy 2.88MB drives so software doesn't ship in 2.88MB disks...