Proposal for solving CD Size problems

[Constantine Evans]

Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> The current i386 and amd64 desktop CDs have a substantial amount of space
> available.  What do you feel is being squeezed? 

vim, of course :) - although I was shocked when I saw the size of 
vim-runtime. That said, it seems that vim-tiny has nearly every feature 
that most users would make use of, with the exception of syntax 
highlighting.

> A DVD-ROM, yes; a DVD-R/RW, no.  With shipit less on the leading edge, even
> more users need to burn their own installation media.

A DVD image can also be significantly harder to download. While CD 
images are a reasonable size, even downloading a 2 GB DVD image would 
cause some of my internet connections to go over their daily caps. In 
addition, not everyone has 2-5 GB free to store the image, whereas I 
would expect that most people have 70MB.

> 
> Language support has always been one of the first things to go, and I expect
> that trend to continue as space gets tighter.  I think that producing
> localized CDs is already essential for usability reasons, and we need to
> move in that direction anyway.
> 
> The WinFOSS is another value-add which isn't core to Ubuntu, and while we
> like it very much, the OS itself is more important, and we may need to
> remove it eventually.  Preferably, we could replace it with a virtualized
> Ubuntu capable of running under Windows.

Do we have any feedback on how useful people find the WinFOSS on the CD? 
  It would seem that for users who are downloading and burning the 
images, there is little value in the inclusion, as I think that 
downloading the programs individually within Windows would be much 
faster and easier. If I am correct in my thought, then the WinFOSS would 
only be useful for people who don't have high speed Internet connections 
and obtain a CD either from ShipIt or from someone burning the CDs (are 
burner-distributors a significant distribution method?).

Constantine