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."

Re:CD?

[Belial6]

No. CDs are an old tech that happen to work in DVD players.

Re:Mint

[jrumney]

Last I looked, Mint comes in at slightly larger than a similar aged Ubuntu release with a similar feature set. The current release is a DVD image for the full version already, only cut down versions are available on CD.

Re:CD?

[Air-conditioned cowh]

CDs are silver disky type things that don't take as long to burn as DVDs do. I'm impatient when I am installing an OS!

Re:I haven't burned a CD in years...

[Darinbob]

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.

Re:I haven't burned a CD in years...

[peppepz]

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).

Re:overburn!

[dotancohen]

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.

No Gnome 2 - no Ubuntu 12

[Aranadur]

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.

Use xz compression (lzma)

[tholme]

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.

Re:I haven't burned a CD in years...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Cap

[war4peace]

Funny thing is: I live in what many people call a 3rd world country (Romania) and I have no data caps on my Internet; and nobody I know has any data cap on their Internet line.
Of course, mobile data is capped, but everything else isn't.

Re:Cap

[__aaqvdr516]

and I live in the USA with a 600 MB/day cap.

Re:Why?

[AdamWill]

"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'.