Partial retraction about CD media

[Tony Baechler]

Kyle and all,

I owe you an apology and I retract my statement about Talking Arch not
offering CD media. Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu either have gone to DVD media
or intend to do so, so clearly this is the new trend. Almost any machine
made in the last 10 years probably has a DVD reader and burners are very
cheap. DVD media is also relatively inexpensive. Therefore, Kyle, you're
right and I apologize. It makes little sense to continue offering a live CD
for download.

Debian does offer a small CD image which lets you install everything over
the network. Am I correct that Arch doesn't have anything similar?

--------------------
Tony Baechler, founder, Baechler Access Technology Services
Putting accessibility at the forefront of technology
mailto:***@batsupport.com
Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone]

[Kyle]

Currently Arch has only one image, which is a dual-architecture CD, and
it is trending larger. I believe last month's snapshot was the only one
that I haven't seen grow by at least 10MB over the past year. Yes, I
can remember when the dual-architecture CD was under 500MB, but that
was probably almost 3 years ago, and we can never go back to that size
and still maintain a dual-architecture image. My guess is that Arch
will do one of two things once its image exceeds 700MB. Either it will
switch to recommending burning to a DVD or writing to USB media, or it
will switch back to two images, one for i686 and one for x86_64. The
second option is far less likely, as it makes little sense from the
point of view of the Arch developers. This does however explain why the
iso is as large as it is, since you are not downloading an image for a
single architecture. Instead, with Arch, you download both i686 and
x86_64 in a single iso file, and the correct kernel and applications
are loaded at boot time. It greatly simplifies things, but does make th
e image nearly twice as large as a single architecture would be.

The only other way I can see to boot Arch is to boot it over the
network. While this seems good in theory, everything happens prior to
loading a Linux kernel, and therefore, it most likely can't be made to
speak. The only offline image is the single iso on the download page,
and TalkingArch by definition must do what Arch itself is doing, only
adding packages and configurations to make it support speech and
braille.
Sent from my test tube