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

[torsionbar28]

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.

That's an awfully rosy view you have there. Calling optical support a "corner case" just shows you don't understand the use cases involved or the user community. And I can point you to a dozen issues that have been demoted to irrelevance, and the result is always the same - bugs get flat out ignored going forwards. Bit rot via intentional neglect.

[torsionbar28]

I can honestly say that I've never installed Linux from a thumb drive. I've only ever done it from CD/DVD. Maybe I'm just old school, it's the way I've always done it, since the later 1990's when distros switched from a stack of floppy disks to a CDROM image. And at work, our remote management consoles and hypervisor interfaces make mounting a virtual media ISO image a piece of cake. I'm not even sure if the infrastructure is capable of mounting virtual USB devices and booting from them, never saw a need to try that.

[starshipeleven]

That doesn't really require non-UEFI. Debian Installer will also confuse some of your pendrives with hard disks no probs. Love to figure such sh*t out.

Not sure what this means. A USB flash drive always shows up in the installer and you can install on it.

[anarki2]

Booting from USB is very tricky before UEFI. Some BIOS treats usb drive as hard drive, some treat its as floopy (iirc).

That doesn't really require non-UEFI. Debian Installer will also confuse some of your pendrives with hard disks no probs. Love to figure such sh*t out.

[anarki2]

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

So... make the util do that for you? Will check that out, ty.

[Danny3]

Wow, this is stupid!
Glad I'm not using Fedora.

[caligula]

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.

Well, around 100% of live images use ISO (iso9660) format for disk images. So the machine probably assumes the USB key emulates a 650 MB CD.

[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.

[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.

[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.