Comments on: Who Deserves Free Ubuntu CDs More?

By: Antonio Roberts

Antonio Roberts — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:38:17 +0000

“But it should take steps to ensure that those who really do deserve the media are not left out in the cold, even if they aren’t active in the Ubuntu community.”

Exactly what steps do you suggest?

By: Mirsal Ennaime

Mirsal Ennaime — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:35:21 +0000

I disagree.

In general, people who aren’t technical don’t install new OSes on their computers on their own. They often do so after being advised by someone who is technical.

These non-technical people will be much more likely to install a new OS with confidence from a professionally pressed CD.

So the model of technical people handing shipit Cds to non-technical people who wouldn’t wait for three weeks for the CD to ship anyway does actually make sense.

By: Yeah

Yeah — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:36:57 +0000

“The wrong priorities?”

Usually, yes.

By: Andrew Oakley

Andrew Oakley — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:10:10 +0000

The idea that a ShipIt CD will solve the problems of someone on reduced bandwidth is rather silly; within a month or two after launch, each distro needs 100MB+ of updates anyway. Most Linux distros, including Ubuntu, are designed with the assumption that they will be connected to broadband. And in the vast majority of cases, they’re right.

By: lelamal

lelamal — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:00:34 +0000

Completely agree with the exclusionary view so coherently described in your article!

By: Jim C

Jim C — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:28:27 +0000

If you are trying to promote it a professional printed cd will do it much better ,
I had to burn 5×9.10 cd’s just to get one working
someone new would not have done this.

By: Steven Rosenberg

Steven Rosenberg — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:17:58 +0000

And … while I understand that Ubuntu needs to take care of its contributors, members, developers, etc., it shouldn’t join the many, many FOSS projects that put the non-contributing user at the very bottom of the ladder (if they’re on the ladder at all …)

By: Steven Rosenberg

Steven Rosenberg — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:12:15 +0000

I have an oldish machine with a DVD-ROM (not an RW for CD or DVD) that responds very poorly to CD-R. It’s better with DVD-R, so if there’s a DVD image, I can burn that and install. It’s also very much OK with regular, commercially made CD-ROMs like the “official” Ubuntu CDs.

I even ran OpenBSD for awhile before I figured out the DVD situation because OpenBSD will install over the network from a floppy image. Once that install blew up, I returned to Ubuntu.

None of my burns worked, so to get 9.04 on this laptop, I used ShipIt.

At the time, I was willing to pay for a CD, but Canonical wasn’t selling them in quantities of less than 20 or something like that.

Now that 5 CDs are available for $10 US, I’m nore than happy to spend the $10, should I want a CD or two. I’ll probably do that for 10.04. I’ll still have a few to give away.

While $10 for 5 CDs is a great deal, I’d rather they charged $3 to $5 for a single CD because that’s what most people need — just one.

The value we get from Ubuntu is certainly worth $3 to $10.

That said, there are plenty of companies that burn and ship discs such as OSDisc, and maybe Ubuntu could partner with one of them to help get the discs out there.

By: 1916home.net

1916home.net — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:47:35 +0000

In several instances now, I have encountered that a burned ISO to CDR or DVD just will not install on older systems. I experienced this when I was donating 8 older computers… 5 where Pentium III systems, the other three were P4’s. I tried burning several cd and dvds at various speeds and those older disc drives have problems with newer burned discs. I ended up ordering a shipit disc and those installed perfectly without a problem. Since then I have requested new discs with every new release in case my burned ISO discs give me problems (of which I experienced with 9.10!!) Luckily, I got the 9.10 disc the next day, and installed great. This time it wasnt the fault of the burning process, but of the early release version of 9.10.

I will miss my free discs… it was a great feeling to get them in the mail. But for $5 I can buy them from a US outlet… not a problem and I suspect not a problem for most users either.