[tex-live] TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation)

[Harald Koenig]

Hi,

first, congratulations for the release of TeXlive 2008 and for all your work,
BUT...

On May 21 2007, Martin Schröder wrote:

> 2007/5/21, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>:
>> This is strange, and abnormal. I assume that the DMA mode for the CDROM
>> drive was disabled. It is true that it takes some time, but 4h is too
>> much.
>
> I think 2h is normal (Harald König tested it repeatedly), and even
> that is much too long.

you did it again (and this time even worse): 

the TeXlive 2008 iso image does only contain fully expanded/uncompressed "live" directories
and does not (additionally) provide zip files for fast installation.

even worse in 2008: you don't provide any install-only iso image (CD or DVD size I don't really care at first).

right now I'm running an installation from DVD drive (with SUSE 10.1, 2 GB free ram and fast disk/cpu)
and after ~15 minutes it's just with "Installing: ebsthesis" (in alphabetical order I guess)
and "du -s" right now shows "516M    total" from estimat4ed 1700+ Mbytes.

I'll follow up installation times and other statistics once the installation is done
(I'll plan a 2nd installation run on my T61p notebook with SUSE 11.0, stay tuned ...;)

so again, installing TeXlive from an optical media is no fun at all -- which is very pitty...
and it's just impossible to "quickly" install a decent TeXlive e.g. when visiting
a friend or customer, or when someone interested in TeX shows up at a local TeX pub meeting
or whatever.

installation times of 60+++ minutes just for TeX is _very_ sad :-(
a fullfledged SUSE 11.0 installation with almost everything (~7+ Gbyte) 
just took ~35 minutes alltogether on my T61p (includung full texlive 2007 from suse rpms;-)


what about
- creating a DVD-size iso image with zip files ?
- creating a DVD image with both live tree and additional zip files ?


the current situation is _very_ suboptimal IMHO...


anyway, I'm really happy about TeXlive 2008, now only the wrapping and packaging
has to get optimized a bit;)


Harald
-- 
"I hope to die                                      ___       _____
before I *have* to use Microsoft Word.",           0--,|    /OOOOOOO\
Donald E. Knuth, 02-Oct-2001 in Tuebingen.        <_/  /  /OOOOOOOOOOO\
                                                    \  \/OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO\
                                                      \ OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO|//
                                                       \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Harald Koenig                                           //  /     \\  \
koenig at tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de                     ^^^^^       ^^^^^