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SuSE Businesses

SuSE Coming on DVD 155

Posted by justin++ from the less-discs-more-data dept.
SuSE has announced that its next release, 6.3, will be available on DVD as well as CD. The release date is supposedly December. I hope this practce catches on. Debian 2.1 was 2 discs for just binaries, and it's much larger now. I have a 6 disc set of SuSE 6.2. The packaging is both neat and clumsy. Too bad the only DVD player I own is connected to my stereo....
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SuSE Coming on DVD More

SuSE Coming on DVD

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  • APS Tech [apstech.com] has a SCSI DVD-RAM [apstech.com], but their DVD-ROMs are all IDE. :(


    ---
  • So, what's the solution?
    #define UNINFORMED_SPECULATION
    I guess Linus is either working on a modified devfs or an alternative scheme that will satisfy the naysayers.
    #endif

    Or he is waiting for someone else to come up with the "right" solution, as he did with the big memory on Intel.

    Jeroen Nijhof

  • What will the DVD version cost, compared to the CD's? I couldn't find the price (or the announcement) on their site. I don't think that the medium itself will make much of a difference compared to the overall cost of a copy of the distribution...
  • I was under the impression, perhaps wrongly, that the current CD fabs are not equipped to stamp DVD discs, and as such there was a certain amount of capital investment necessary to either bring the CD fab up to DVD par, or build a new plant for DVD's. Either way, the fabs (and upgrades) are costly and as such the supply of DVD fabs is relatively low, so DVD stamping is more expensive than CD stamping.
  • Umm. SuSE would be on a DVD-ROM disc - you don't have to do any decoding on a DVD-ROM, just on DVD-Video discs. Also, there's been nothing "inconsistent" about my DVD-ROM drive's record of reading discs in Linux - Linux sees it as just a really BIG CD-ROM drive, and it doesn't care - it reads it just the same. (It just isn't (yet) playing DVD-Video discs...)
  • Potato has 1.78 GB of binary-i386 .debs , debs are compressed with bzip2.

    Uhm, no. I think all debs are compressed gzip and I know that all of them that I've ever looked at are.

    Or more accurately, they are 'ar' archives of a few packaging files, with the actual binaries from the package in a gzipped tar file.

    For example, take a look at the latest grep deb, grep_2.3-7_i386.deb:


    # ar -x grep_2.3-7_i386.deb
    # ls -l
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp 977 Nov 3 08:54 control.tar.gz
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 122245 Nov 3 08:54 data.tar.gz
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp 4 Nov 3 08:54 debian-binary
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 123416 Oct 5 13:59 grep_2.3-7_i386.deb

    The file data.tar.gz contains the actual package binaries, man pages, etc., while the control.tar.gz file contains the installation and removal scripts

  • OK so it's late (no-one will ever read this) and I'll probably lose a load of Karma for saying this (but in case you moderators care...I really am trying to make a serious point here)...but here goes!

    It seems like a great idea to put linux on dvd if it's so big it won't go on a single/double cd. But WHY is it so big?? I've never delved much into suse but it just seems rather big if it needs 4+ cds. Even M$ don't make an OS that big, and linux is supposed to be small & compact? Something just doesn't add up in my mind. Is it that these distros come with loads of apps which aren't actually part of the OS? In which case, can you get just the OS on one cd?

  • See Interplay's order page. Unfortunately, the DVD version is identical to the CD version; they didn't bundle in the expansion.

    Publishers will continue to release CDROM versions as long as they think it makes economic sense to do so, as they did with floppies. When something you really want comes out only on DVD, don't pout too much: 2X DVD-ROM drives are down to $40.
  • I hadn't really thought about this until now, but I take this to mean cd's are quickly becoming obsolete. With floppy drives still included on computers, I still consider the CD to be new technology. But with Linux distributions shipping on 6 CDs, it seems to be time to move on to something else.

    Will this be the test for obsolete removable media? I mean, if it takes any more than one piece of media (i.e. one cd, or one floppy) to store a program or distribution of an operating system, is that an accurate sign that its time for something new? CDs seem to have become old technology before ever maturing. Sure, you can record and even re-write them, but the recordable drives were never as cheap and ubiquitous as floppy drives. I'm still waiting for a replacement for the floppy. Maybe DVD will be it.
  • You make that statement as though you were conversant with all the details. What piece of $400 software are you talking about? There was decoder hardware that I believe came on a PCI board that might correspond to your claim but that is no longer an issue. Current Macs that come with DVD-ROM drives include software decoding DVD player software. It is most likely the case that with a G3 you could download this software from Apple (or a friend) and you should be fine.
  • You obviously live in the non-modem world. Try doing it over a 56k dialup. Not everyone has the luxury of dsl/isdn/leased/t1/etc.
  • /me has dreams of every arch + source on one dvd
    /me wakes up and realizes i don't have dvd drive and neither does just about any one else
  • DVD's are more expensive because less fabs have the technology to burn the higher density DVD disks. But DVD drives are almost as cheap as CD drives of equivalent speed. With more demand for DVD's, because the drives are so cheeply available, more demand will arise for the actual discs, and as such the cost of DVD manufacturing will go down (according to scale). As for CD's dissappearing, I'm giving them two to three years until you *need* a CD player to get the goods. :)
  • My experience installing off a CD in my DVD-ROM drive is that it's remarkably fast. Possibly you aren't getting good throughput from your CD-ROM drive for some reason. DVDs are almost an order of magnitude more dense than CDs, so I would expect an even higher transfer rate from a DVD.
  • For the person remarking about the size of SuSE: Interesting - RH6.0 was 3 CD's, i think, and you couldn't install it on a zip disk. SuSE 6.2 is 6 CD's and it can still be installed on a zip disk - it's just a matter of how compact the original disk is. As for the # of disks, it seems to be expanding at a linear rate.

  • I may be missing the boat here, but I thought DVD drives weren't supported by linux. I mean, I'm using one right now, but Linux thinks it's a plain old ATAPI CD-ROM. I assume that the proverbial "bad things" will happen if i try to read a DVD-ROM. . .

    Wouldn't make much sense to distribute an OS on a medium the OS can't use, would it?

  • There are some Mac SCSI DVDs, but since most Macs have IDE now (as well as already having DVDs from the factory in many cases) they're getting rare. You might just want to get an IDE controller card and IDE DVD since they'll add up to be less than the SCSI DVD I bet. Too bad if you're short on slots....
  • Yes, but it's not really bloat in that most of those pkgs are optional.. IMO, the more code the merrier as it gives me a larger toolchest to draw from, though as I don't have a DVDROM in my PC yet, it's not terribly useful to me...

    More bits for less $$$, I can't complain.
    Your Working Boy,
  • This is NOT a current G3...
    Yet.. you are right.. it IS the pci card that's required.

    They still neglected to mention such on the phone.
    (Sorry I don't know more about macs... I prefer Motorola chips in big-iron machines)


  • This will definitly be nice seeing that SuSE has been growing by one CD since 6.0 (excluding the live filesystem cd). Plus it will help with remote installation of packages via Yast since no disc swapping will be necessary. Now to just find a cheap 4x or so DVD drive.

    -----
  • First of all, SuSE has always been a top-notch distro, they have lots of smart people working for them. Because of that, I'm sure that SuSE will probably do something like have 6.3DVD come with a bootable CD-ROM that does all the module loading, formatting, etc. After you select which modules you want to install, they'll probably have you enter the DVD disc for all the packages. A simple, effective solution. ;) Go SuSE!

    Mina Inerz

    Mina Inerz [N. Reinking]
  • Can we have a day on slashdot with just DVD related articles? I think it'd be pretty fun. Regardless, I think this is a great idea, assuming they market them cheaply (we hope). Any problems getting a standard dvd drive to read the full disk space or can that already be done now?
  • First of all, SuSE has always been a top-notch distro, they have lots of smart people working for them. Because of that, I'm sure that SuSE will probably do something like have 6.3DVD come with a bootable CD-ROM that does all the module loading, formatting, etc. After you select which modules you want to install, they'll probably have you enter the DVD disc for all the packages. A simple, effective solution. ;) Go SuSE!


    Mina Inerz [N. Reinking]
  • DVD drives are just seen as a standard ATAPI Disc drive to the computer. The only difference between DVD drives and CD drives are the lasers used to read the data off the disk.

    -----
  • I got a 155mbit connection.
  • hell yeah! this is neat... one question tho: can you boot an OS from a DVD drive? (I can't see the option for that in my BIOS :o)

    ---
  • I only got about 1.5 megabyte per second from my CD-ROM.
  • and could cheapbytes and places like that duplicate these? anyone got a DVD copier? (not DVD ram)
    how much $ for it? how much for blank DVDs?
  • Ok, less than 12, I get the idea. Thanks guys. I was like 8 at the time, and it was my first experience with computer gaming. But I am quite sure that KQ5 was 20+ disks.

  • A simple answer for Justin (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Tuesday November 02, 1999 @11:41AM (#1568397) Homepage Journal
    All you have to do is hardwire your stereo to play data DVD's as audio, hook a microphone up to your computer, and download the files via your sound card. :)

    Just remember to crank the volume way up, to reduce data loss from background noise. (eg: Neighbors screaming at you to turn that b* racket off)

  • FTP (Score:1)

    by henrik ( 98 )
    It is faster to install via FTP than from my 24x CD-ROM, and I guess DVD is not much faster either. I'll remain an FTP installer.
  • and higher seek times if the data is poorly organized.

    -l
  • Can a DVD be made bootable, and if so, is there existing hardware support for this? This would seem important for releasing flexible operating system installations. Floppies are old fashioned, just look at the iMac. (j/k)
  • I will begin to care about DVDs at such time as:
    • DVD writable disks cost not more than $10, so that they're not too much more expensive than CD-R's
    • DVD writer drives cost not more than $500

    Until that time, I'm quite happy using the so mature they're dead cheap technology of CD-ROMs.

  • Well here in the United States, English has been in the grip of the "learning by doing" methodology which has all but wiped out formal learning of grammar beyond the basics in primary and secondary education. Unfortunately (here in Texas anyway), the standardized tests are only interested in basic grammar. I don't remember ever hearing the phrase "accusative case" in all thirteen years of school. I learned more about English grammar in my Latin classes than I ever did in English where they were more concerned about five-paragraph-essays than the ability to speak and write correctly.

    Be that as it may, I am not against the "learning by doing" methodology in and of itself. Rather, my concern is that English teachers take so little interest in fact whilst delving so much into the world of fiction.

    $0.02USD,
    -l
  • (Since playing DVDs under Linux, till recently seemingly only a frustrating dream, now gets closer and closer ...)

    And is there a USB icon, too?

    timothy

  • Just a thought for all software developers like me who want to test an app on differnt plaforms.. Apple has a package for MacOS developers that has all OSs from 7.1 to 8.6 on a DVD for your compatibility testing pleasure; Prehaps the same with Linux and *bsd would be useful as well?
  • IDE DVD drives use the ATAPI protocol. Put a CD in, and it looks just like a normal CDROM drives. Put a DVD in, and you can mount it just like you can a CD, except it can have a lot more stuff on it. (You should have a recent kernel to be able to read the larger filesystems).
  • I just wrote to cheapbytes [cheapbytes.com] and asked about their dvd plans.

    Basically, they said "not yet." The price-per-disk is coming down nicely, but the hefty set-up cost makes them wary of titles that won't sell well. They're waiting for better market penetration of the drives.
  • The coolest thing about Linux on CD is that the CD's are bootable. I don't have a DVD-ROM drive so I was kind of wondering: Are DVD-ROM drives bootable? I guess DVD's really are catching on now. I thought it was one of those fad technologies like LaserDiscs or DAT audio tapes. This is a step in the right direction for the whole software industry.
  • The coolest thing about Linux on CD is that the CD's are bootable. I don't have a DVD-ROM drive so I was kind of wondering: Are DVD-ROM drives bootable?

    I guess DVD's really are catching on now. I thought it was one of those fad technologies like LaserDiscs or DAT audio tapes. This is a step in the right direction for the whole software industry.

  • I think it's cool that SuSE is doing this, but my main question is, how long until we get DVD burners for home use? I imagine recordable DVD CD's are probably relatively more expensive than CD-R's, but at the same time, one can store several (if not more) CD-R's worth of information on a single DVD.
  • Does this mean we'll get exclusive DVD-only features like a widescreen installer? How about "the making of SuSE Linux" video?

    How about linux installer subtitles in 87 languages? Simultaneously too?
  • essentally dvd movie decoding and playback is not supported in linux. data dvd's should work just fine... IE not encoded.
  • wolf3d was on 2 or 3, doom was 5.

    I had win95 beta on floppies, that was fun ~21 floppies. OS2 was about the same.

  • DVD (Score:1)

    by Zach978 ( 98911 )
    DVD- Digital Video Disc.

    I think that it needs to be renamed, DVD is obviously used for more then video now. I would think that eventually it would replace CDs, used to music, video, and of course data.

    -Zach

  • I received two copies of FreeBSD (2.2 and 3.2) on DVD's already... but it's no use to me right now since I don't have a DVD-ROM in my computer.

    They are very rare, so I'm definitely going to keep it for myself ;)

    Anywho... it's nice to see that more and more orgs and companies are making DVD-ROM a very reliable and smart storage solution. I wouldn't mind buying a subscription of DVD's that mirror the data on ftp.cdrom.com :)
  • Yup, I'm getting a DVD just for this, I can still remeber installing OS/2 Merlin, inser disk #44 here. :| The best thing is that there is finaly a good use for DVD on PC, seeing as how much most linux users are getting fed up with switching CD's, I think these kind a steps should increase DVD-player sales.
  • According to the ads here in the UK.
  • Yeah. I dread moving to 56K- I've seen transfer rates spike at 4-5 meg/s to metalab/sunsite.unc.edu from my room, and consistent rates of 800K/s. At that speed, I easily beat CD. But not for long :(
    ~luge
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • You mean you haven't been playing Riven: The Shorter, Better Looking Version of Myst?

    -Chris
  • Wow - playing the SuSE DVD on your stereo would be even more fun than 'cat /vmlinuz > /dev/audio'!
    --
  • Then maybe my lil' bro's G3 would be able to use the
    DVD player he had installed when he bought it...
    The one they didn't tell him he needed extra software (==$400) to watch movies with.
    Don'tcha just love build it yourself Macintosh ordering personell?

    (No.. I wasn't around when he ordered it, or that wouldn't have happened)


  • Uhh, what's wrong with the 'hardware' category? It's not like there's going to be a constant flux of non-movie DVD articles or USB articles period... (And it's a category, not an icon. Categories just happen to have icons.)

    Reminds me of this one conversation I overheard in a library. A bunch of posers trying to look intellectual were talking about how they "got on the information superhighway by running Netscape. What's it that Netscape is... oh yeah, it's an icon."
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

  • I'm not positive on this but I think some alan cox kernels have support for large files. I could be totally wrong thoug. It just sounds like something that crazy old hacker might do.
  • Is it a Director's cut? Subtitled? And hopefully in Letterbox! Can't stand the translations of this wonderful movie! I hope the add back in the scenes that they cut for the theatrical release...

    ttyl
    Farrell
  • The world ended in 1900
    then S.u.S.E invented the universe with Linus quietly sanctified.
    Off I go, in search of a DVD drive.

    Thank you very much.
  • I have used SuSe 6.1 to do minimalist installs of under forty megs. (I couldn't live without the libs for Festival and fortune; nothing like starting the car to fortune) Just because the distro has 3,717 packages doesn't mean that it isnt perfectly functional with fewer than 100.
  • I have a DVD (Pioneer 303s) and a CD ROM (Burner, Plexwriter) on my 7890. I can boot CDs from either drive.

    I do not know if there is a spec for bootable DVDs. The spec for bootable CDs is called "El Torrito" and is an extention to iso 9660. I don't think that there is any similar spec for DVD's. (What do they use, UFS or something like that?)

    -P
  • Not to be pessimistic, but what happens if you want to install packages after installation, given that Linux can't read DVD's consistently? Or can they make it so no decoding needs to be done? Or are they planning to have a reliable method for reading DVD's by then?
  • I'm sure this trend will continue. It really is a chicken and egg syndrome. First there needs to be enough DVD drives in the field to make it worth the publisher's time and expense to produce the DVD distribution. But, people are still questioning the need for DVD drives. Luckily, the movies being available on DVD are helping to kick-start the availability of DVD drives.

    Remember how long it took for CD's to take over the software distribution. For a long time the software was being distributed on floppy (first 5 1/4, then 3 1/2), until now software only comes on CD. Be patient, it will come.
  • First the curse. SuSE 6.2 is already 6 CDs, and that's a lot of packages (although, thankfully, it seemed decently organized... and the INDEX file means that with grep, it's not a problem figuring out what's where.) However, with all that extra space... is there going to be much reason to allow for minimalist distributions? or encouraging compact packages?

    However, it might be a nifty boost to the multi-distro folks. Imagine a DVD with just the GPL'd versions of multiple distros, and one front-end that asks for which installer to use...

    It'd be nice if they bring back the live filesystem with the main distribution rather than as a separate product.

    Or, say others could package a minimalist distro, a full-featured distro, and a BSD or two onto the same disc. Or a distro plus a Sunsite pub/linux mirror...

    And so forth.
  • heh you always get a 'installing from floppies' flashback when suse asks you for the next cdrom.

    wise move by the suse team, those crazy germans.

  • I belive he was just refering to the way the computer saw the disk, in otherwords, you didn't really need any new drivers to get them to work. I've managed to get a frends computer up and running, reading CDs with an old ATAPI CD-rom driver, eventhough it was a DVD-rom drive. I'm not sure if older drivers would beable to handle the larger storage aria
    --
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

  • DVD stands for DVD (Score:3)

    by redled ( 10595 ) on Tuesday November 02, 1999 @02:58PM (#1568445)
    It's true. Some members of the DVD forum (a group of commercial companies that manufacture DVD devices -the same group responsible for the tricky copy-protection) wanted it to stand for Digital Video Disc, while others wanted it to stand for Digital Versatile Disc. So, officially it stands for absolutely nothing. ONe good thing about this: It makes a fairly good gauge of a salesperson's knowledge. If a salesperson knows that DVD stands for nothing, then he is probably not completely clueless. Unfortunatly, most salsepeople are quite positive that it's "Digital Video Disc."

    --

  • The usual DVD drives conform to the Mtfuji or MMC spec, which is basically just a beefed up ATAPI. It will understand exactly the same packets as those defined in ATAPI 2.6 and then some. There are other differences as well, but these all relate to DVD _specific_ features, such as reading of DVD structures, CSS authentication, etc. So saying the Linux sees it as just any other CD-ROM drive is correct - indeed it should.

    The only problem you'd see by inserting a DVD movie (for instance) and copying files from it, is if the disk is encrypted. You'd then get an error in your logs stating that a "read of scrambled sector without authentication". For your run-off-the-mill porn, you could probably get by without any problems :)

  • Hmm. Is a DVD CROM bootable?
  • I'm more of the "give-me-SCSI-or-give-me-death"

    The Pioneer U03S is an excellent SCSI DVD-ROM (6x). A SCSI version of their new 10x DVD-ROM will be (is?) released. The 10x is RPC-2 protected. The 6x is not (As long as you do not remove the RPC jumper).

    Bye
  • I've seen these posts two days in a row, and I must say, they definitely are adding to my day. Come on people, figure out it's a joke and laugh a little. I think it's hilarious. =)
  • Yes, they act like normal CD-Roms. I've installed Be and SuSE linux with them, but not in DVD format, they were standard CD's

    I think it'll work. I mean, you really just need a drive to read DVD formatted discs, but you need a decoder card/software to decode the movies and such.

    Later . . .
  • Heheh :) Definately, I'm glad SUSE is doing this. Finally I can say that my DVD-ROM is worth the money I paid last month [my GF almost killed me] after I splurged for a Sony 21" Earlier this year :) The Matrix on a 21" KICKS ASS!
  • This is a great thing. Like the days before the CD-ROM became universal, there were wonderful things like "Insert disk #15". We are seeing software ship with multiple CDs, in some cases all of which are absolutely necesary to use the software. DVD can buy us at least a few years before that happens again. Linux distributions won't have to think twice about whether or not its worth putting that last program on the disc, or devoting the space to something else, after this catches on. Good move SUSE, this will improve Linux and get me to buy a DVD drive.
  • I've been waiting to see this for quite a while -- but I'm curious as to what they are going to do with the people that are still using archaic CD's
    I realize they are going to be making the CD set -- but will their be a cost difference etc to compensate for the extra 5-6 0.2 cent disks?
    I'm pretty sure DVD's are the same cost to produce as CD, could be mistaken -- but I am having flashbacks of the transition from floppy to CD-Rom... if I have to mail off to get a set of CD-Rom's I'm going to be a bit irritated..
    -= Making the world a better place =-
  • Granted, I recall trying v4.0 via floppy. Future Brother in Law brought over a box of 50 floppies and said "You won't need the 12 or so with xwindows..."

    Now it comes on a DVD. Odd that this is the same system you can install on a matchbox sized server.
  • That's the letterbox director's cut edition, right? With the free poster and the commentary play-by-play?
    ----------------------------------- -----------------------
  • Neighbors screaming at you to turn that b* racket off
    Aah, sweet nostalgia.
    It's just like owning a Spectrum again.
  • I have a DVD drive in my laptop, and it has no problems booting the red hat CD and installing
    I'm guessing it's the same all around, because it uses mostly the same data standards. Just more data
    -= Making the world a better place =-
  • The only difference between DVD drives and CD drives are the lasers used to read the data off the disk.

    And of course the little side effect of drastically increased storage capacity means nothing.

    Why is it that techie types seem to get obsessed about the technology behind the result and sometimes act like the technology behind something is everything, when the technology is nothing more than a means to an end, and the end is what is really important.
  • Finally use SuSE users won't be prompted to insert CD-ROM disk #4. DVDs and Linux are a good combonation. Linux distros can more easily package all the components they want to include without a 4 pound box filled with CDs. Especially SuSE, 6.1 had 5 CDs and 6.2 has 6, which means a lot of extra goodies that don't need to be downloaded but that comes at the cost of keeping track of half a dozen CDs.
  • Acording to a quick check of my debian archive.

    Potato has 1.78 GB of binary-i386 .debs , debs are compressed with bzip2.

    over 4100 packages.

    There is supposed to be an anouncement on the debian feature freeze today.
  • Yes, you can. I have a Creative DVD player, and I booted into Linux just fine for installation. I'm not sure if it would work if you had both a CD Rom and DVD though, because I only have a DVD player.
  • Cody, is that you? That has to be you. I can't imagine anyone else going by a variation of Judge talking about his 35" TV and 19" monitor...

    If I'm wrong, I apologize :)
  • I was looking through these messages for answers to my question regarding bootability from a DVDROM disk. I had seen some answers, but they were clearly not thought out very well. Both the drive hardware, media hardware, and media format is different with DVD disks. Booting a regular CD in a DVD drive means nothing. There are three issues, the drive itself, the physical media, and the data format of the CD. What is the data format that DVD disks use? We know that an El-Torito CDROM disk will boot in a DVD drive, but the disk is still not a DVD. I believe that El-Torito bootable CDs also MUST be ISO9660 in their format, is this true? There are other formats such as ISO9660 Xtra, JOLIET -- which I know is NOT bootable -- and CDUDFRW. DVD disks probably do not use ISO9660. There will have to be systemboard BIOS issues. I believe that there are several types of physical media formats because of the different data capacities. We have a standard with CDs (Thank you Sony and Philips), but with DVDs, every company and their dead grandmothers poodle has been trying to make their own format the standard for monetary purposes, thus all of those different types of DVD disks, dare I mention those super audio disks? We may find information at http://www.cd-info.com/ I am going there next. Will post if answers found. What about SPARC? I do not know how their booting CDROMs are different other than the boot block size difference, which I belive is also true or Macintosh systems. I use Debian which has been ported to many different platforms -- SPARC, i386, Alpha, M68K -- and I question the use of DVD for these systems. There is no way that my SPARC 10 is going to boot on a DVD. Regular old CDs will still be around for some time, but using DVD disks is a good idea. The next version of Debian LINUX will take up three CDs just for the binaries. This will help. I very seriously doubt that any DVD disk at this time is bootable or could be made to do so, unless they conform to the El-Torito standard which I doubt that they do.
  • Sure, there's no problem booting off a DVD
    ATAPI/SCSI drive - if your BIOS supports booting
    off an ordinary CD-ROM drive, it will handle
    DVD too.
  • But how is the linux side of it?? The last time I tried to set up a DVD drive I had nothing but trouble. I finally just put in an old 16x CD rom... (After all, until now I didn't need one for linux...)

    Also would like to add that kudos to SuSE for this one. They consistently have the most complete distro, even if they try to install everything in German... I just hope that they keep all of the great things involved in the OS. The live filesystem, the bootable CD, etc. We use the live system cd here often for troubleshooting.

    ~Jason Maggard
    "God, Root, what is difference?"
    -Pitr
  • Movies on a 19" monitor may not sound all that great, but remember that monitors are non-interlaced, which makes a world of difference compared to TVs. Watching The Matrix on my 19" computer monitor is not bad at all; the picture is great even when you get really close. So that's why a DVD drive for your computer is a Good Thing, especially now that 1) Linux will be playing DVDs decently real soon now and 2) Linux distributions are beginning to arrive on the medium.
  • DVD disks probably do not use ISO9660.
    DVD-ROM discs can use ISO 9660, UDF, or both. El Torito bootable DVD-ROM should not be a problem, as long as the boot image is not out past 4G. (Which might someday be nearly as annoying as the 1024-cylinder problem.)

    DVD-Video discs are REQUIRED to be in UDF-bridge format, which includes ISO 9660.

  • (response, getting slightly OT and onto USB) (Score:3)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Tuesday November 02, 1999 @06:31PM (#1568477) Journal
    Pascal Q Porcupine wrote:

    Uhh, what's wrong with the 'hardware' category? It's not like there's going to be a constant flux of non-movie DVD articles or USB articles period... (And it's a category, not an icon. Categories just happen to have icons.)


    Well, you're right: DVD and USB are different things.

    Re: DVD -- there might not be that many non-movie DVD articles here, but in truth it's the movie-related ones I'm interested in mostly. I think it's cool that SuSE will have a DVD distro, though! (Didn't FreeBSD have a DVD distro starting months ago? Or was that strictly a hypothetical?) I like it partly because it will encourage more people to buy DVD drives for their massive storage -- and hopefully then want more from the hardware they've already paid for. The more Free / free OS users with DVD drives, the better as far as I'm concerned. There have been a string of hope-inspiring bits about DVD lately, as the software and hardware under Linux (and hopefully soon for the BSDs) come together. And as that happens (there are several projects working on Linux video already ...) I think it'd be great to have a distinct DVD category to announce major developments, new player front-ends, etc, with an icon, so I can spot it at the top of the Slashdot page -- categories are abstract, icons are nicely visual. (Is my usage correct now?!) ;)

    And as for USB, I disagree that there are no articles dealing with it -- it's been a pretty good topic of conversation, especially when it comes to discussing what will be in upcoming kernels. And there ought to be more! USB devices are handy and no longer a curiosity in either the Mac or Windows worlds ... the more Linux supports USB, the better it will be. Case in point is the Microtech USB SmartMedia / FlashCard / MicroDrive reader I got a few weeks ago: it costs less than a hundred dollars, but provides connection to three types of small, dense storage. I wish it would work under Linux, so I could use it at home as well as at work.

    Thumbing through a magazine ("Digital Camera"? Something like that) at a local bookstore a few hours ago, I also noticed a screen-color calibration device -- with a USB connection. There are all sorts of devices which use USB -- input devices (including bar code readers), storage devices, printes, scanners, blah blah blah ... so far Linux is unfortunately (and I think temporarily) behind the curve in supporting them. I'd be curious to hear from developers why this is; are there inherent coding difficulties with USB? If there are, can they be expressed in layman's terms? From what I understand, the only support so far is for keyboards and mice -- about the only things that I don't care about being USB. :(

    And about the people in the library ... well, to most people using a computer (and as GUI designers strive for, at least in part), an icon effectively *is* the program it represents; the GUI takes away the complexity which would have made a computer otherwise forbidding to (some / many) users. Maybe in a couple years, the people you call posers now won't be. Right?

    Cheers,

    timothy
  • Thank you Eric!

    btw: HUGE DVD information link http://www.unik.no/~robert/hifi/dvd/world.html

  • Don't forget to flip over the DVD after he gets the first side.
  • USB support is getting to be more extensive, the 2.4 kernel is going to support quite a few devices.

    However, there is a considerable hurdle that needs to be dealt with before USB support is truly seamless. USB devices are designed to be hot-swapped, and there can be 127 of them on the one bus. There are many, many, different types of USB devices. If you located an entry in the /dev directory for every single possible device, there would be literally thousands of entries. In addition (and I'm not a kernel hacker so I'm not exactly clear how this works) each of those entries in the /dev directory is actually a kind of pointer to a "device". Devices are each given a number, and it turns out that USB would probably exhaust the number of permissible devices.

    So what's the solution? Obviously we need some kind of scheme to allocate entries in /dev, and device numbers, dynamically. Such a scheme exists already as a kernel patch called devfs. This hack allocates devices dynamically as required, and according to its backers basically solves the problem.

    However, there are a lot of important kernel hackers who don't like devfs, for reasons I don't understand but these guys presumably wouldn't object just for the hell of it. The debate has raged for a considerable time now, even before the USB problem put more pressure on to find a solution. As I understand it, while Linus hasn't included devfs in the mainstream kernel, he has basically not commented on the flamewars.

    So, what's the solution?
    #define UNINFORMED_SPECULATION
    I guess Linus is either working on a modified devfs or an alternative scheme that will satisfy the naysayers.
    #endif

    Hopefully a solution will arrive before the 2.4 kernel is released.

  • cheapbytes should offer a DVD which includes SuSe, Red Hat, and Debian on it. Mmmmm.
    --
    Matt Singerman
  • Two things are gonna make this a royal pain for people trying to make their own DVD's:
    • Filesize limit on 32-bit linux means it gets tough to create 5GB dvd images. You'll have to do imaging from an Alpha, Sparc64, MIPS64, or Itanium box.
    • Outrageous prices on DVD-burning/pressing equipment

    Also, to answer another poster, the potato freeze is being postponed until at least Nov 7, basically the holdup is the boot floppies - it's a bad idea to go into a freeze without working boot floppies.

  • DVD-R copiers are available from Panasonic etc. $5k or so. I don't know about media. But that is not important. Almost all of the disks I have ordered from Cheapbytes have been done by a mass duplication system, not one at a time in a CD-R drive.

  • Speaking of DVDs as install media .. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    .. does anybody have a copy of DVD #8 of Microsoft Office 2000? Mine was eaten by the dog. DVDs #7 and #9 are okay, but number 8 has the paperclip on it and you can't have a complete Office installation without that little bastard.

    please mail me if you have this dvd
  • Another type of thing to benefit from this would be games like Baldur's Gate; it came of 5 CD's, prompting a lot of disk changing unless you allocated 3GB of your hard drive to it. I'd been waiting for something to make use of the extra space, and SuSE is definately a prime candidate with their distribution.

    However, I'd hope they continue to use CD-ROM for those who don't yet have DVD.
    --

  • I didn't want to buy a DVD ROM for my computer, I thought "Hey, I dont wana see movies on my dinky lil 19" Monitor when I can watch em on my 35" TV". But seeing as we are starting to get some real use out of DVD besides just movies, I may have to splurge for one. I think Ill hold out awhile though before I buy my DVD player for the comp. I'd really like the DVD-RAM, but at 500-600$ for it and 20-40$ for each disks its a little out of my range. But kudos to SuSE for starting to make DVD's more useful. I always loved SuSE, now I know why. =]

    ----------------------------------

  • Linux on DIVX. Pay per install! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Special DIVX-ROM with built in modem and user supplied phone connection required! $1.00 per install or "permanently unlock" your Linux distro (on single DIVX-ROM drive only, phone connection still required) for a $30.00 one time fee!

  • Wait, wait! You can't do that! (Score:4)

    by extrasolar ( 28341 ) on Tuesday November 02, 1999 @12:34PM (#1568513) Homepage Journal
    I just patented:

    Using a storage media greater than 500 megabytes for the storage of many individually compressed software components.


    Pay up! Yep, that means you future mp3 DVD burners too!

    :)

    But seriously, this is great. While the rest of the world is getting excited about DVD movies and mega-games, I think the greatest thing about DVDs are more space! Just think: all the binary packages AND the source on ONE disk.

    Oh yeah!

    ***Beginning*of*Signiture***
    Linux? That's GNU/Linux [gnu.org] to you mister!

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