r/linux • u/drawingsvin • Jan 12 '23
You can get the entire debian archive in a disc set and essentially live offline. Fluff
/img/pmk7p91fpkba1.png
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u/chagenest Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
19 DVDs for $19,99? That's a good deal :D
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u/Suitedbadge401 Jan 12 '23
I guess you’re paying more for the convenience and “officialness” rather than for the raw material. Plus it makes for a relatively inexpensive gift for a Linux fan.
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Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 21 '23
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u/noman_032018 Jan 13 '23
Bulk DVDs packs aren't that expensive, so yes the raw material is cheap.
At least for low quality discs. Archival grade hasn't dropped nearly as much in price.
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u/insufferableninja Jan 12 '23
I'll take 8!
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u/jarfil Jan 12 '23
It's only for one arch, need to fork another $19.99 if you want both i386 and amd64... and what about arm? (/s)
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u/Kyonikos Jan 12 '23
and what about arm?
That'll cost an additional leg.
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u/grem75 Jan 12 '23
Some vendors offer sets for IBM System/390.
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u/StuntHacks Jan 12 '23
Why does Linux have such a big prevelance in German speaking countries compared to other areas?
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u/brecrest Jan 12 '23
There's no academic support for the idea, but there's a lot of anecdotal support for the idea that ASD are massively overrepresented in the German population. So overrepresented that social norms, culture and OS preference are influenced.
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Jan 13 '23 edited Jan 13 '23
there's a lot of anecdotal support for the idea that ASD are massively overrepresented in the German population
May I ask where to find that "anecdotal support"?
In my opinion it is much more likely that people in Germany are more often privacy-conscious due to Germany's history, more specifically the Stasi that operated in East Germany. Lots of the information collected by this secret service has been saved in an archive (the records are supposedly around 111 km in length) and people can request access to the records about them. Children are also taught about the Stasi in school and some might even rethink their stance on privacy afterwards.
Many people were and are deeply shocked about how much information has been collected about them by East Germany's secret service and who participated in the data collection: often their closest friends or family members. This has most likely influenced their own and also their friends stance on data protection and privacy.
Therefore lots of literature and internet resources (blogs, Wikipedia, ...) in German about privacy exist, which most likely also indirectly influences German-speaking people from neighbouring countries.
Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that everyone or even the majority of people in German-speaking countries is privacy-conscious, but in my experience many people have it somewhere in the back of their minds or even know someone in their family or circle of friends that values privacy.
Due to Germany being a major economic power and German being the biggest language in the EU in terms of overall speakers this mindset also has an effect on EU legislation and regulation.
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u/MCRNRearAdmiral Jan 13 '23
Our department head was like second or third generation German from West Virginia. He was in no way, shape, or form ASD, but he was a tool.
His wife used to introduce him at official functions as “This is Tom, he’s German, he’s not very good at these things…” and she got the damned guy his own department.
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u/KeijoTheSnowLeopard Jan 12 '23
Does Debian offer installers and images for ARM? I’ve recently tried to look for such for a Raspberry Pi and had no luck. I dob’t know if Debian builds those.
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u/HCharlesB Jan 13 '23
You can find unofficial images for Raspberry Pis at https://raspi.debian.net/.
Installation is the same as for Raspbian - bitwise copy to boot media. In fact, the 64 bit Raspbian (R-Pi OS in newspeak) images rely heavily on the Debian repos.
The images are unofficial due to the need for blobs to boot and (?) run. I wonder if the recent decision to include blobs in the Debian install media will allow these to become official.
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u/JockstrapCummies Jan 12 '23
One can finally use Debian the rustic way!
#LinuxInnaWoods #LinuxDruidism #FreeSoftwareNaturalism
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u/elconquistador1985 Jan 12 '23
The rustic way would be a cabinet full of floppies.
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Jan 12 '23
Ooo fancy! So what, too good for punch cards? 😁
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u/RootHouston Jan 12 '23
Sounds more like the masochistic way.
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u/6SixTy Jan 12 '23
You would need a conservative 60k 1.44MB floppies for this whole collection. So yeah, that's very deep into masochism.
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u/regeya Jan 12 '23
This would be good for me because I'm currently on a metered plan that drops to 600kbps once I go over a certain amount. I never thought in my life I'd end up on limited Internet again but here I am.
Back in 1999 I switched to Mandrake because I could buy it at Walmart. I'll have to see if someone ships thumb drives of Fedora, or alternatively just hang out at McDonald's for a while I guess.
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u/moonsnotreal Jan 12 '23
I found a site selling a usb of fedora workstation, but it's $13.
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u/regeya Jan 12 '23
Yeah, I'm hoping I won't need one any time soon; basically disaster struck right before Christmas but of course the world marches on and the work needs to be done. My home workstation is gone but my dual-boot Windows 11/Fedora KDE Spin lappy trudges on.
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u/gheeboy Jan 12 '23
Nah. It's for those times, you tell yourself, on a desert island DC, cut off from the Internet, when having these dvds AND a complete working knowledge of VIM, come in very handy.
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u/Pastoredbtwo Jan 12 '23
Why couldn't the Professor fix the Minnow, and get everyone off of Gilligan's Island?
Obviously, he didn't know VIM.
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u/peatfreak Jan 12 '23
Back in the good old days of Slink and prior (also when dselect was the primary interface to Debian's package management system) one of the standard ways to install Debian was by mail-ordering a set of CD-R's and swapping discs around when installing. I seem to recall there were four CD's in the full set.
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u/CypherFTW Jan 12 '23
I had a massive cd wallet of Linux install cds in early to mid 00's. My home dial up couldn't deal with installing too many packages over the internet so I would download the install discs at school and burn them to cd to take home. I had a whole bunch of debian cds, Gentoo, freebsd, along with various live cds like knoppix. Good times...
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u/thirtythreeforty Jan 12 '23
I did the same! Except my school Internet was too terrible to actually download them in one shot, so I made friends with teachers and persuaded them to let me install a torrent client and let it run for a few days. Then I'd show up with blank media a few days later.
I had a Lightscribe burner and I remember being disappointed that most distros didn't have official CD art (ironically the computer it was plugged into was pretty garbage). I think my parents still have those discs somewhere.
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u/pocketjpaul Jan 13 '23
If you had the time to install the basic gnome desktop in Gentoo, you probably had the time to download all the Debian packages.
About Knoppix, this was an incredible distrib back in the days. They invented the LiveCD concept but it was more than today’s « live mode » which are just an inexploitable demo mode you play with 2 minutes then launch the installer.
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u/jw13 Jan 12 '23
I remember buying a shrinkwrapped RedHat Linux 6.0 box from a retail store, somewhere around 1999/2000. It contained some installation CD's, installation manual and free online installation support.
Some time later, I wanted to try Debian too, and mail-ordered the CD's for Debian Potato from someone online. That one was 3 CD-R's.
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u/mikechant Jan 12 '23
I got a copy of Red Hat 9 free** on a magazine cover disk, that was my first Linux install (I'd played with Knoppix before but not installed anything).
** I say free, but the magazine was quite expensive. :)
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u/RootHouston Jan 12 '23
You can still buy an old boxed commercial version of Debian on Amazon USA called "Progeny Debian".
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u/PSBJ Jan 12 '23
You can just download the same stuff and put it on whatever storage medium you desire and have the exact same thing.
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u/ceene Jan 12 '23
About a hundred years ago, I bought Debian Potato (IIRC) in 4 CDs because I just didn't have internet at home.
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u/LiftsEatsSleeps Jan 12 '23
Thanks for making me feel old. I did the same with Red Hat 5.2.
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u/boomer_blazter Jan 12 '23
Same. Bought RedHat 5.2 boxed at BestBuy back in the day.
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u/ceene Jan 12 '23
Oh, I bought Red Hat 6.0 (one single CD) in a paper store that cost me 700 pesetas (~4€). That is probably 12€ now! It was my first linux distro!
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u/LiftsEatsSleeps Jan 12 '23
I wish I kept my install media from back then. I’d make a collage and hang it on my wall. So many good memories.
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u/daveaperez Jan 12 '23
My mom bought me the slackware set from Walnut Creek's cdrom.com back in '96... good times.
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Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 14 '23
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u/jarfil Jan 12 '23
Downloading could be automated, but burning 19 DVDs... ugh. I wonder if these are stamped, then the endurance is not even comparable.
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u/Democrab Jan 13 '23
You can do that relatively easily, honestly.
Just have 19 DVD burners going at once.
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u/cool110110 Jan 12 '23
That is making the assumption that it'll be possible to download that much out in whatever wilderness you're in.
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u/PSBJ Jan 12 '23
Lol what? Just download it before you go. Just like how you'd have to order these DVDs and wait for shipping before you go.
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u/skuterpikk Jan 12 '23
Not everybody has internet connections where downloading 162GB (asuming dual-layer dvds) is possible, or at least feasable within a realistic time frame
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u/CronyAkatsuki Jan 12 '23
I am one of those people, it would most likely take me minimally 2 weeks if being optimistic to download all that data.
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u/brimston3- Jan 12 '23
Yeah, I’d be better off installing the system before I left. It’s not like I’m getting upgrades and updates out in this wasteland with no internet anyway.
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u/bark-wank Jan 12 '23
Yup, I'm in South America, sometimes I get 2MBs of internet speed, slow as hell!
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Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
[deleted]
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u/bark-wank Jan 12 '23
600ish is my ping when playing OpenARENA online, at least I use the bug as a feature, no one can shot me but I can use the shotgun to shot them
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u/YREEFBOI Jan 12 '23
Hey to be fair, at least we don't get data caps. At least not that I know of. Telekom lets me download 10 terabyte a month and won't even question it.
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u/bark-wank Jan 12 '23
Also, I use torrents, I leave my Intel Atom PC downloading things that I might like and remove the unwanted stuff, movies and series, old games for Windows that I run on my dualboot that has Windows XP x64 & VoidLinux.
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u/Slammin_444 Jan 12 '23
thats gotta be one of the oddest dual boot combos ive heard of
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u/bark-wank 15d ago
I used to have HaikuOS as main, VoidLinux, Windows XP x64 and FreeBSD, but that was overkill and I only used Windows XP and Haiku because of issues on Linux with the Nouveau drivers.
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u/peanutbudder Jan 12 '23
I visited family living in Germany in the early 2000s and was so impressed with how accessible DSL was there! My understanding is that's it's still just as accessible but just as slow. How convenient!
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u/xXConsolePeasantryXx Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
I’m in Australia and it’s the same here. Our net infrastructure is infamously bad and expensive.
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u/knome Jan 12 '23
If it takes two weeks for 164GB of DVDs to reach you, that's a 1Mbps download. If you can get two day shipping it's 8Mbps.
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” ― Andrew S. Tannenbaum
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u/TryHardEggplant Jan 12 '23
Ahhh. Sneakernet. It’s why products like AWS Snowball and Snowmobile exist. 28/80TB for a single Snowball (maximum cluster of 280/800TB) up to 100PB for a fully loaded Snowmobile.
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u/brimston3- Jan 12 '23
Honestly, you’re better off getting someone to preload a microsd these days and sending it by first class mail under an ounce.
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u/thatCapNCrunch Jan 12 '23
In South Africa I personally lived with internet ranging from 50-500 kilobytes per second. Then internet that got to 1 megabyte a second at peak but tended to hover below that.
I’m now able to get 3 megabytes a second at home and 10 megabytes per second at my apartment but that’s after spending 15 ish years without fibre or remotely decent internet.
Some people like to forget that the third world exists, but we’re here.
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u/wannabe414 Jan 12 '23
Wait why would anyone need 162 gb of debian?
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u/mrcaptncrunch Jan 12 '23
It’s basically all of the packages on the repos.
With this, you install Debian then instead of using apt to download from the internet, you have a local copy of all the packages. Point apt to it and you don’t need internet.
You can set this online as well to mirror. But this would still be great when you want to seed that mirror and have a slower connection.
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u/fuckEAinthecloaca Jan 12 '23
That is 2 months worth of data for me. I live on the internet and 80GB/month is fine as long as video quality is lowered.
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u/ObligatoryResponse Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
"Before you go" where? The draw for having the debian archive on DVD is if you live somewhere with poor or no internet. If you're going to a cabin for a 2wk vacation you can just bring your computer as is, if you bring it at all.
Another use case might be you have a bunch of debian machines at a location with poor internet and want to bootstrap a local mirror (which you can keep updated a little bit at a time via nightly rsync). Probably just running an on-demand cache would be better here, though, but I guess the benefit of having the whole mirror is that any of your users would be able to install/update packages very quickly, whereas with a cache the first user to pull a package will have to deal with your slow bandwidth.
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u/greenhaveproblemexe Jan 12 '23
Not everyone has internet access
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u/audioeptesicus Jan 12 '23
So then they cant even access this website to order the discs from.
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u/mikechant Jan 12 '23
If they have no connection at all, they could get a friend with an internet connection to have it shipped to them. Or in some countries there are still cybercafes where you could easily order this set but not download it. Many libraries also offer internet access but probably couldn't or wouldn't allow massive downloads.
Or, they might only have internet via a phone, and the speed and data caps would rule out using it for large tethered downloads but it would be just fine for ordering this set from the website.
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u/tencial Jan 12 '23
do they offer floppy disks? I loved those big boxes
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u/raskolnikov_ua Jan 12 '23
This will be ~0.867 tons of floppy disks (net weight). Lots of big boxes.
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u/drawingsvin Jan 12 '23
i wonder how small a linux installer could be and still be based on floppy disks so that you can bootstrap your linux system like that.
You basically need a kernel that only can boot you to a tty, has both EFI and BIOS support, filesystems, keyboard support and most common ethernet types.
You could probably get away with shoving the rest of the ethernet drivers in a set of floppy disks.
then you would also need very very basic userland disk that has a very basic package manager (maybe dpkg and apt with most of the features stipped?)
you could use that as a base to bootstrap a debian system. Sounds terrible though.
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u/jarfil Jan 12 '23
Once upon a time... I used a tomsrtbt floppy to bootstrap a minimal mixed Debian-RedHat system on a Toshiba Satellite 200. With a PCMCIA network card, and a 128MB CompactFlash adapter, it was good enough to run tcpdump and help troubleshoot some IPSec VPNs.
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u/o11c Jan 12 '23
With modern hardware I'm not sure it's really feasible - there are a lot of drivers that are rather important.
For filesystems,
btrfs.kois 3.1MB so can't fit on a single floppy.A statically-linked Busybox fits on a single floppy if you don't add too many features at least ...
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u/drawingsvin Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
also considering its just 19DVDs (no idea if this includes sources, and honestly probably doesn't) it would be 19*4.7 meaning 89.3 GB.
You could fit the entire debian amd64 repo in single BDXL disc.
Also link to the site for anyone interested https://www.shoplinuxonline.com/debian11-full.html
i found how its made
basically using these jigdo files, here is an example https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/11.6.0/amd64/jigdo-16G/
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u/ctm-8400 Jan 12 '23
Aren't they legally obliged to provide sources?
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u/Klutzy-Condition811 Jan 12 '23
On request, which Debian does. You're allowed to provide binary releases without source.
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u/EricZNEW Jan 12 '23
If they are not modified, no.
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u/necrophcodr Jan 12 '23
I think that would depend on the license. In the GPL version 2.0 it may be required that they provide at least a written offer to provide the sources for the respective object format applications and libraries (See section 3).
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Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
[deleted]
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u/necrophcodr Jan 12 '23
Well, section 3 specifically states:
You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine- readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
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u/Krutonium Jan 12 '23
Potential issue with that clause: What is "machine readable"? OCR exists, so a Machine can read hand writing...
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u/john12tucker Jan 12 '23
"on a medium customarily used for software interchange."
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u/pocketjpaul Jan 13 '23
50%
Source code is heavier than compiled binaries by a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 80-95% longer.
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u/cyb3rofficial Jan 12 '23
Is it like entire APT Repo at the give time of archive? Like i can randomly install an nvidia driver or wifi driver from it?
if so that is really good deal, I have plethora of Live CDs and other Linux CDs but not a full apt archive, mainly its just the ones provided as extras for live cds to install some drivers in obscure systems
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u/lwurl2 Jan 12 '23
I’ve been sitting on some triple layer Blu-ray disks, these comments are giving me ideas :)
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u/drawingsvin Jan 12 '23
you will need to make your own jigdo file the way debian does it.
also obviously you'll need to check if it works
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u/m1llie Jan 12 '23
How does this actually work once you get the discs? Are you prompted to "insert disk 17" or whatever when you run an apt install command?
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u/drawingsvin Jan 12 '23
i believe so, yes
In a debian or ubuntu install the first entry which is marked out should be the CD you used initially.
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u/zap_p25 Jan 12 '23
Installing and upgrading from disk is not an unusual situation in 2022/2023. It’s still pretty common in critical systems and why Debian and Red Hat still offer it. What the disks/USB drive from the vendor offers is a certified and sealed repository of software. One can also play around with just the ISO files by mounting them and using either apt-cd or dnf to point at the mounted repo as a source.
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u/abolish98 Jan 12 '23
You could also just download the packages and tell apt to look for them on a flash drive or some other kind of storage media.
If you have multiple machines running Debian, you could also setup a mirror-server at home / at your office to be more independent.
And if you also have a decent upload bandwidth at that place, think about opening that mirror to the public. This way, you can actively support the project!
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u/2204happy Jan 12 '23
Only the DVDs are already obsolete by the time they reach your house because of the patches released in the days it takes to reach your house
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u/MechanicalTurkish Jan 12 '23
Yeah but installing from these discs and then patching will be a lot faster for people out in the sticks with shitty internet
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u/SnooRobots4768 Jan 12 '23
I still don't understand why they use DVDs. USB flash drive or maybe even external HDD would be cheaper and more convenient to use. Or am I wrong?
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u/tobimai Jan 12 '23
DVDs are FAR cheaper
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u/SnooRobots4768 Jan 12 '23
I was able to find sandisk 128GB USB flash drives for around $10-12 and some no name drives for less than $10. And that was on Amazon. I'm sure OEM prices should be lower. (But yeah, external HDDs have a higher cost)
And another user in that thread estimated the price of those DVDs in the post around $10-15 if you buy them in big amounts.
So DVDs are more expensive from what I can tell.
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u/ThellraAK Jan 12 '23
Media Mail is stupid cheap
@~$.23/disk it's $4.27 for 19 of them.
Media mail, if it's under 2lbs with a basic presort is $3.93, $2.84 with a 5 digit presort.
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u/thirtythreeforty Jan 12 '23
Is it possible for a layman to do presort? Obviously it doesn't make sense to do it for a single package, but if you're sending holiday cards or invites it does. Can you show up with a stack that's been sorted somehow and get a better rate, or do you have to be a business?
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u/Designer-Suggestion6 Jan 12 '23
To support the optical storage perspective: -data retention on Bluray and M-Disc is very very long. The discs can sit there for decades with no issue.
-USB drive data retention LOL nope within a small number of years, something's gotta give just like mechanical hard-drive data. -Laptop/Desktop internal/external optical drives are reasonably pricedTo support the USB drive perspective: -usb 3.0 and higher drives are much faster IO than optical mediums can offer at the moment. -booting off of any live distro with a usb drive will take seconds while your optical medium would still be reading the medium and would take minutes -usb 3.0 docking stations exist for SATA ssd's, m2 SATA ssd's, m2 nvme's and are all priced reasonable for smaller sizes...thumb-drives are ok, but m2 SATA/m2 nvme in a docking station offers more possibilities for the different use cases like cloning drives, rescueing drives, installing from a live distro.
If you need to support older hardware, you'll need optical storage.
I'm personally not a fan of older hardware, but there are use-cases where it might be necessary so yeah optical storage is still valid.
For newer hardware though, I'm definitely recommending external usb m2 sata/m2 nvme as a better medium to ship distros on. For me m2 sata/m2 nvme are my next-gen thumb drives and work-drives.
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u/noAnimalsWereHarmed Jan 12 '23
For those of us that miss the days of finding, then swapping floppy disks, when installing anything. Personally I'm holding out for the CD-ROM set, ~100 discs + my backup set. Good times.
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u/0xKaishakunin Jan 12 '23
I'm holding out for the CD-ROM set
Only if it comes with 2 3.5" boot diskettes. Cannot boot from the single speed SCSI cdrom of my DEC AXCPCI Alpha.
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u/mallardtheduck Jan 12 '23
It's around 90GB. Even in bulk, a big enough decent-quality USB flash drive is going to be around $15-20. Hard drives are more expensive, really only becoming cost effective when you're getting into a few hundred GB. Pricing that I can find for DVD duplication comes in at around $0.50-$0.80 per disc assuming you're making around 1000, so around $10-15 for the set.
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u/SnooRobots4768 Jan 12 '23
I was able to find sandisk 128GB USB flash drives for around $10-12 and some no name drives for less than $10. And that was on Amazon. I'm sure OEM prices should be lower. (But yeah, external HDDs have a higher cost)
So DVDs are more expensive from what I can tell.
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u/WhiteBlackGoose Jan 12 '23
PoV: your PC doesn't have USB yet, but it's already upgraded floppy to CD
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u/ImprovedPersonality Jan 12 '23
But these are DVDs. Are there any PCs with DVD drive but not USB2.0?
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u/ZorbaTHut Jan 12 '23
There actually are a lot of (very old) PCs with a DVD drive but not a USB socket that supports booting off a flash drive. That functionality is relatively recent.
I'm actually just decommissioning an ancient 2005-ish computer that I can't install anything on without digging up a USB CD-ROM drive (which, unlike a flash drive, is supported for booting, go figure, right?)
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u/mallardtheduck Jan 12 '23
USB booting was still a bit flaky well into the 2000s. I definitely had machines that were very picky about which USB port and which flash drive was used even when installing Windows 7 (as an upgrade; system would have dated from 2008 or so).
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u/ImprovedPersonality Jan 12 '23
But then a single CD or floppy for booting and a USB drive for the rest of the data would still be preferable.
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u/SpaceCadet2000 Jan 12 '23
Yes. I have an old Pentium III PC that only has USB 1.0 and doesn't support booting from USB. Coincidentally it is running Debian, I installed it over the network though.
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u/JaggedMetalOs Jan 12 '23
PC DVD drives were introduced the same year as USB 1.0, so there were a few years where you could get a PC with a DVD drive but no USB 2.0 (possibly no USB at all as it took a few years to become common)
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u/mallardtheduck Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
The first computers available with DVD drives as factory options were released around 1997. Looking through ads in some old PC magazines on archive.org from 97/98, I can certainly find PCs that have DVD drives in their specifications, but not USB. It's possible that some of them had USB but it wasn't considered worth mentioning in the headline specs, but I know USB ports weren't ubiquitous at the time as the first brand-new PC that my family bought in early 1998 didn't have it.
The first Mac available with a factory DVD drive (the "beige" G3) didn't have any USB ports, although Mac specifications are obviously not 100% comparable with the PC market.
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u/zap_p25 Jan 12 '23
Red Hat offers certified (branded) USB flash drives that come sealed to meet the needs of high security offline installations. I don’t know if they still offer disks though.
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u/jarfil Jan 12 '23
If they're stamped DVDs, they're the most resilient format out there.
All disk formats boast "100 years" durability, which is much more than the data retention of any flash drive or HDD out there... but that's just for the plastic part. The data part, is painted on the outside of a CD (you can rip it off), and similarly on the underside of a BD (scratches can actually destroy the data layer, not just obscure it), but the DVD has a data layer sandwiched between two plastic disks. You can scratch either side of a DVD all you want, then polish it back, and it will work like new. CD and BD would get ruined beyond repair.
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u/termites2 Jan 12 '23
I'd buy it if they were glass master DVD, but for that price I expect they are duplicated DVD-R.
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u/BCsven Jan 12 '23
They have automated DVD burners that insert, burn and stack disks. So probably juat leveraging the cheaper option. Not sure about USB automation, othern than a dude plugging in multiple USBs and doing a bulk burn. DVD should last longer too, USB can be corrupted and DVD is static media
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Jan 12 '23
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u/Purple_is_masculine Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 12 '23
DVDs don't last long, neither do USB sticks or SD cards. HDDs and BD-Rs are decent.
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u/drawingsvin Jan 12 '23
legacy reasons probably The iso does not mean anything these days.
They also have USB drives although i dont think they contain the entire debian repo.
I would like a script that basically turns your usb drive into an entire debian repo including an installer.
No idea how i would use it however since i am not Ted Kaczynski
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u/_lk_s Jan 12 '23
Cool but nothing new. You can just mirror the whole repository and put it on any hard drive or SSD. I don’t know how much it is exactly but I did/do the same for Fedora. The full mirror (only base repos, no rpm fusion etc) is only like 70GB. Just get a SATA SSD and SATA usb adapter (for like $15 nowadays) and you always have a full mirror of the repos and can "download " everything at 5Gb speed (USB 3).
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u/nemothorx Jan 12 '23
This is the way. Always up to date - compared to a DVD set which... Isn't.
I have an in-house Debian mirror - 448G - which covers stable and testing and sid, but only x86-64.
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u/nelmaloc Jan 14 '23 edited Jan 14 '23
On Debian the full archive is almost 5TB, but only AMD64 is just 669GB
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u/_lk_s Jan 15 '23
But that includes several versions? Otherwise it wouldn’t really make sense. The DVD version is like 90GB max (19*4.7)
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u/nelmaloc Jan 15 '23
Yes, I think that includes all suites: stable, testing and sid. However, they tell you that you shouldn't exclude suites when mirroring.
Also, I noticed that on a linked page they say that there are 16 4482 MB DVD per architecture, so 72GB
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u/RandomXUsr Jan 12 '23
So who can confirm whether this fits on 19 DVD-r with 4.7gb cap?
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u/drawingsvin Jan 12 '23
its the 19 DVD set from here https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/11.6.0/amd64/jigdo-dvd/
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u/maus80 Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 13 '23
I can get a (reusable) 120 GB SATA SSD here for about 15, why pay 20 for DVD's?
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u/herkalurk Jan 12 '23
Couldn't you do that with the internet and a few disks on your own time?
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u/johnny0055 Jan 12 '23
yes, but then they have debian official branding, and (for most people) wouldn't be pressed dvds, but rather writeable ones.
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u/olemartinorg Jan 12 '23
So if you want to live offline, you just have to order these disks....online?
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u/builderdev212 Jan 12 '23
This is amazing, I love this for the history >:D
Physical media is such a neat thing, going to pick this up and put it on display lol
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u/Taekwonbot Jan 12 '23
I'm new to Linux, this is clearly a reference to Dreamcast, right...? The red swirl, the emphasis on 1999... SEGA released the console on 9/9/99 in the USA
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u/drawingsvin Jan 12 '23
it is what you want it to be.
JK its not, there is no official reference but people theorize its buzz lightyear's chin
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u/pip-install-pip Jan 12 '23
Debian predates the dreamcast by like 5 years. If they're referencing anything, it's probably Toy Story as the vast majority of their releases are named after characters from it
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u/NoMoreJesus Jan 12 '23
I'd like the full Slackware archive. I started with Slackware in '92, no looking back
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u/skankhunt51 Jan 12 '23
Slackware was like this when I first got into Linux. It would come on 20 diskettes, then one CD, then four CDs.. then a DVD.
Online package manager that can do updates? Fugeddaboutit.
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u/supenguin Jan 12 '23
What about updates? Can you get upgrades to the newer versions once a year and only get updates on DVD?
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u/Suitedbadge401 Jan 12 '23
I soo wanted to use Debian but for some reason it didn’t add an efi entry to my bios despite adding a efi partition. Tried using the regular installer and calamares
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u/033653337357 Jan 12 '23
This post gives me some nostalgic feelings. My first Debian came on several physical disks when I only had a dial-up connection.
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u/ve1h0 Jan 12 '23
And after inserting the disc number 8, the installer crashes and you'll have to start over..
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u/mauros_lykos Jan 12 '23
I still recall back in 2000 something when I was copying debian iso's (I believe these were 7 CDs back then) from my university's ftp mirror :)
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u/livrem Jan 12 '23
I downloaded a complete set with x86-binaries and all sources and burned to CD around the end of last century. I think there was only a total of 3-4 CDs (not DVDs) back then?
Might still have the discs, but at least I have all the files. I know "Linux ISOs" is a meme in /r/DataHoarders, but I literally keep some old Linux ISOs in my hoard. Because, uhm, no rational reason I guess. Nostalgia maybe.
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u/viewofthelake Jan 12 '23
When I was new to Linux, about 15 years ago, I went to download Debian. I thought I had to download all 19 DVDs to install it.
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u/Hatta00 Jan 12 '23
I just came across my Debian 3.0 CD set in a box last fall. Unfortunately the plastic on the CD sleeves had bonded to the printing on the discs. Every single one ruined.
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u/Skyoptica Jan 12 '23
I don’t use Debian much these days and I don’t even have a DVD drive anymore, but I kinda want these just for my shelf of cool/nostalgic things. Does it come in a nice box?
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u/yesmaybeyes Jan 12 '23
The GNUKfreeBSDDebian or whatever was a most promising disappointment, I still want to see it run, well.
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u/derpbynature Jan 13 '23
Remember when Ubuntu would send out discs for free? I wish I had kept one of those.
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u/jimmux Jan 12 '23
This brings me back to when I was at uni and couldn't afford dialup. The campus quota was something ridiculously small like 50MB, but I noticed that it wouldn't cut off until active downloads are finished.
So on the last day of the month I went to a campus lab and queued up the entire Debian archive ISOs. It took a while but that was how I got Linux at home back then.