Fedora Deciding Whether CD/DVD Installation Issues Should Still Hold Up Releases

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Deciding Whether CD/DVD Installation Issues Should Still Hold Up Releases

Fedora will continue producing ISO images of their distribution that can be installed to a DVD (or CD in the case of some lightweight spins) or more commonly these days copied to USB flash drives, but they are debating whether any CD/DVD optical media issues should still be considered blocker bugs in 2020 and beyond...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-32-Optical-Media

[AndyChow]

I still use DVD's for install for a few machines that I have that are pre-UEFI and do not have PXE or USB boot options. This happens so rarely that my portable DVD drive is covered in dust. But it does happen. I don't think it should be a deal breaker, because I could always use an older release and update.

Not sure why those machines can't boot a usb key but can boot on a dvd drive plugged into a usb port, but that's how they behave.

[zxy_thf]

I still use DVD's for install for a few machines that I have that are pre-UEFI and do not have PXE or USB boot options. This happens so rarely that my portable DVD drive is covered in dust. But it does happen. I don't think it should be a deal breaker, because I could always use an older release and update.

Not sure why those machines can't boot a usb key but can boot on a dvd drive plugged into a usb port, but that's how they behave.

Booting from USB is very tricky before UEFI. Some BIOS treats usb drive as hard drive, some treat its as floopy (iirc).
UEFI makes things unified but also requires one more partition.

In addition to these, all macs use EFI 1.0, which becomes yet another corner case to deal with.

[Britoid]

Given that Fedora doesn't make 32bit images anymore, they probably shouldn't even care about CDs at all.

[xorbe]

I am confused. If the ISO is broken for DVDs, isn't the ISO also broken for using from a USB thumb drive?

[Britoid]

I am confused. If the ISO is broken for DVDs, isn't the ISO also broken for using from a USB thumb drive?

No. They work differently it's just certain magic allows a single image to be used for both.

[mathew7]

But...but....that will break my multi-iso USB flash config, that uses grub loopback to load the kernel and initrd.
Granted, xubuntu and ubuntu-mate are my usuals, but I don't want a new trend....eventually Canonical may follow.
Plus, it's easier to md5sum/sha1sum a single iso to ensure it's still unaltered and Win8+ already can mount the image so you can just copy the files for an UEFI boot.
PS: I don't have twitter, but the poll question is misleading....I don't use optical media per se, but I use it's packaging. I even have Zalmans VE300 and isostick for a literal-text answer of "no".

[Mathias]

I would have used DVD a few days ago if the Laptop I was installing had a DVD drive... wait - that was windows. I had serious problems booting from USB on Windows. It amazes me, how MS releases images that are not straight bootable from USB these days. Never had a problem booting Linux from USB though.

Kill DVD if you want.

[anarki2]

Btw why is it so darn hard to generate a bootable UEFI ISO from a UEFI zip bundle? All the tutorials I could find consisted of pages and pages of instructions and commands. Quite ridiculous. Does anyone know a nice Linux util (either CLI or GUI) that can do it in a _simple_ way? I.e. here's this folder with the required EFI folder, make it into a bootable pure UEFI ISO? Like on Windows?

[cjcox]

IMHO, there's no good reason to terminate this except to tick off people (too soon).

But interesting to hear that there could be problem with a DVD ISO vs USB (why? that is, why would the DVD fail?) Do all remote IPMI-like things boot whatever will be produced (drac, ilo)? Just thinking out loud.