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You can buy the entire Debian 12 archive on 21 DVDs
- jprd 3y agoThis absolutely takes me back to the 90s.
- andrewf 3y agoIn all seriousness, I was once looking for a truly ancient version of WINE (mid-90s, I was curious about its Win16 implementation in those days). There didn’t seem to be any standalone archives surviving, but source and binaries were present on a mid-90s set of Debian ISOs. I’m glad they make stand-alone artifacts.
- LtWorf 3y agoOr, online here http://snapshot.debian.org/package/wine/ http://snapshot.debian.org/package/wine/
- londons_explore 3y agoPresumably source is well preserved in anything that uses a version control system?
- LtWorf 3y agoYou need a whole snapshot of the entire machine to compile, if it's very old the possibility that it just build with modern dependencies are basically 0.
- chmod775 3y ago> I’m glad they make stand-alone artifacts. Note that the shelf live of many types of CDs and DVDs isn't all that long and you shouldn't rely on them to preserve things. Some will be unreadable in less than a decade. It varies a lot by materials used (Table 2, also note the paragraph preceding it): https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/conservation-preservation-publications/canadian-conservation-institute-notes/longevity-recordable-cds-dvds.html https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
- ManuelKiessling 3y agoIt says „Now using Ritek Pro 60+ year archival quality DVDs.“ in the details.
- brirec 3y agoJust be aware, these discs are expected to last more than 60 years, but we sure don’t have a single surviving example of a 60+ year old DVD yet!
- IYasha 3y agoNot a word on M-Discs? o.O Weird.
- gyudin 3y agoThey should sell DVD drives with it :D
- RecycledEle 3y agoUSB optical drives are a thing. Most PCs could boot off them starting long ago.
- globular-toast 3y agoBack in like 2004 or so Fedora was already up to like 6 discs (can't remember if they were CDs or DVDs). A friend at school who had a broadband internet connection (rare at the time) downloaded and burnt one for me, thinking I'd still be able to install it off the first one even I'd miss many optional packages. Unfortunately it didn't work. At the end of the installation it requested disc 6. I never got the remaining CDs but I would occasionally boot it just to experience using something that wasn't Windows. That was a few years before you could get order Ubuntu on one CD for free so I could switch to GNU/Linux and never look back.
- Avshalom 3y agoIt looks like they also sell it on USB https://www.shoplinuxonline.com/debian-fullusb.html https://www.shoplinuxonline.com/debian-fullusb.html
- ksec 3y agoIf only we could invent an extremely cheap read only NAND chip.
- kotaKat 3y agoThat exists. Just tie the write-protect pin on most NAND after you're done writing to it.
- m463 3y agolooks like a 128gb usb flash drive $23
- paholg 3y agoThat USB has 21 isos on it. I wonder why they didn't just make it a giant bootable USB.
- pdimitar 3y agoMaybe they don't know about the Ventoy software.
- pjmlp 3y agoAh, this brings back memories of Walnut Creek CD-ROM collections.
- netsharc 3y agoDamn! I had such a CD growing up, I remember browsing and wondering what all the software did, and trying them and not figuring them out... Gee, I wonder if there's an online archive somewhere...
- RecycledEle 3y agoThat brings back memories of ordering Linux distros by mail because downloading them over a dial-up modem was not practical.
- baobun 3y agoFor actual practical purposes, BD would make so much more sense than DVD. 21 DVDs would be 2~4 disks. I find it a bit odd how that's not an option. Did Bluray never get significant adoption for PC in the US, such that demand for DVDs would still actually be similar or even higher than for BD?
- tpmoney 3y agoOne thing I've learned recently trying to go back through my old disc collections and archive things is that discs are prone to failure over the long term, and spreading your data out over more discs means less overall loss when a failure occurs. I have CD-Rs that have pin holes in the foil layer, whole sets of DVD-Rs from CompUSA that look perfectly fine and show up as new blank DVDs rather than the data that's clearly on them. Yes, archival quality discs can help and the Taiyo Yuden's I bought way back when I think have all held up, but even some of the pressed and manufactured DVDs and CDs I have are starting to show signs of failure. If I were going to buy a large archive of software, I think I'd want it spread across multiple discs, even at the expense of having more physical media.
- shiroiuma 3y agoI have a bunch of music CDs from the 1980s and 90s, and I've never ever seen a failure on one of these, except from scratching. CD-Rs, of course, have not held up as well.
- not_the_fda 3y agoAudio CDs are really an analog format and are less susceptible to degradation than digital formats.
- shiroiuma 3y agoNo, audio CDs are digital. You're thinking of Laserdiscs, a video format from the 1980s.
- 3y ago
- IYasha 3y agoThanks from the fans of shiny physical media out there :)