One CD/DVD to rule them all

[Erwin Van de Velde]

Hi all,

Let me tell you my situation first: I have a laptop with 64b Kubuntu and a desktop at home with 32b Kubuntu. At work, I maintain 2 64b Ubuntu servers and a lab with 32b Ubuntu desktops.
So I end up downloading 4 CDs, all with Ubuntu on it, but just a bit different here and there.

Would it not be nice to have one DVD? In grub you can pick 32b and 64b and afterwards you just get the choice on what to install: Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Server edition. If communities of other variants are also very active (don't follow them that intensively myself) and want to contribute, why not adding Xubuntu, Edubuntu etc?

In fact, if one uses an installation from the net (like most users with decent Internet access do nowadays I assume), it could all fit on one CD!

I know, one does not need the CD for every upgrade so it is not every 6 months the case, but then again... PCs fail and so in the lab I need one rather often, and a clean install now and again is also good practice in my opinion.

What do you think? Would it not be feasible and nice to have one CD or DVD to rule them all?

[leeshaub]

is the one CD/DVD to rule them all from Lord of the Rings? And i like the idea one DVD shoud be good.

[Erwin Van de Velde]

I may have been inspired by Lord of the Rings indeed
Hope more people like the idea... and devs actually make it come true!

[grahammechanical]

May I direct your attention to the Full Circle magazine? You will find a link to the magazine site under the Third Part projects folder. The issues of the magazines are PDF documents. Look for issue #45 January 2011 and turn to page 13, the Linux Lab article. It is not exactly what you are talking about. But it is similar and may be you could adapt the directions.

Regards.

[Erwin Van de Velde]

At least it shows that my question is not that strange
Hopefully a couple of devs read this post as well and decide to do something with it...

[Sean Moran]

There is a neat little script called mbusb that I found on this forum a couple of months ago, but I just ran a search and came up empty-handed. It's designed for running multiple distros from a single USB stick, but I can imagine it adapting to suit a DVD if you could setup the simple directorty structure with /boot/grub and /boot/iso and then copy the required ubuntu .isos to the /boot/iso directory, and adjust the grub.cfg file to include the half dozen distros, and then create an .iso file of the whole to burn to DVD.

There might be something I'm not taking into consideration, but if it works for multiple distros on one USB, I can't see how it wouldn't theoretically work for multiple distros on one DVD, providing you could setup the right grub.cfg and directory structure before making the whole lot into one big .iso.

Better still, why not just set it all up to run from a USB drive?

[Bram Gadeyne]

Hi,

I'm also looking for such a DVD compilation!

Since Ubuntu has stopped the shippit project i'm writing my own disks. A DVD with several distro's would come in handy so people can choose their bit version. I could then always provide them with the most current version.

Did you ever find something suitable?