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

[Guest]

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.

Even ancient laptops I've dealt with support USB boot, but if you're in that weird case where you don't have USB support, you can use plop boot manager to work around the problem. Just put it on some medium that's bootable with your firmware, even a floppy would work.

[Ipkh]

Windows doesn't integrate as many drivers I to their install image and due the way the Windows preinstallalion image works, it might not support the chipset drivers. So once it takes over from the bios it can't detect the usb devices (like the keyboard).

[Anvil]

it'd be cheaper to get rid of the DvD an CD ISO images all together an just go with the boot.iso image instead . which is what i would of thought a lot of people use nowadays anyway

[ssokolow]

I haven't used RPM-based distros since Mandrakelinux 10.x, but I still install and boot recovery discs from DVD because none of my USB flash drives have a write-protect switch.

[Etherman]

And what does virtual machines boot from?

[starshipeleven]

And what does virtual machines boot from?

You can make much simpler "boot images" for that purpose. But yeah it's kind of weird.

[starshipeleven]

Btw why is it so darn hard to generate a bootable UEFI ISO from a UEFI zip bundle?

Because apparently the only way to boot is to embed a small Fat32 partition with UEFI stuff in it. This is a much shorter tutorial https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...ot-efiboot-img

[starshipeleven]

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.

IPMI has USB passthrough and you can boot USB drives. It's not particularly convenient unless you are in the same local network though.

For a more serious bare-metal setup you are booting a dedicated installer image with PXE.

[stiiixy]

Some people above seem to not entirely comprehend they're NOT removing optical support, just reducing any show stopping bugs to irrelevant caused by this corner case in order to ship the whole project. Optical isers arent being throen under the bus, more like theyve missed the bus, and have to wait for the next one.

[garegin]

I remember the good old days when most computers didn’t have USB flash boot support. Our computer shop was too noob to setup RIS/WDS. We constantly had to burn new disks because they kept getting scratched.
For laptops it was unbearable because drives are custom, so you can’t just swap in a spare one if the existing one is flaky.
Then one day I got fed up after a botched XP install and looked into RIS. That led me to WDS and the rest is history.
Nowadays, I don’t think network installs are a big thing anymore because many laptops don’t even have Ethernet ports. Some have “PXE enabled” USB Ethernet adapters, but not all.