You can buy the entire Debian 12 archive on 21 DVDs | Hacker News Reader

You can buy the entire Debian 12 archive on 21 DVDs

shoplinuxonline.com

61 pointsunleaded35 comments

In 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.

Or, online here http://snapshot.debian.org/package/wine/

Presumably source is well preserved in anything that uses a version control system?

You 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.

> 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/con...

It says

„Now using Ritek Pro 60+ year archival quality DVDs.“

in the details.

Just 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!

Not a word on M-Discs? o.O Weird.

For 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?

One 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.

I 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.

Audio CDs are really an analog format and are less susceptible to degradation than digital formats.

No, audio CDs are digital. You're thinking of Laserdiscs, a video format from the 1980s.

The only computers I’ve seen that ever came with BD drives were basically home “multimedia” PCs — if anything, I’d suspect most of these computers are more likely to already be in the trash than in the possession of someone interested in installing Linux on them.

Most people, nerds and otherwise, stopped using optical media for sneakernet years ago, and for good reason: you can buy a 5-pack of 64 GB USB 3.1 flash drives (which hold more, and are faster than, a 50 GB BD-R) for $23 on Amazon.com.

For comparison, a 25-pack of 50GB BD-R discs will run you $45, and of course that doesn’t include the drive. It’s still less expensive per GB, but it’s also far less useful because you can’t really share a burned Blu-Ray disc with anyone the way you can share a USB disk.

Did BD get significant traction on PCs anywhere? AFAIK, nobody even bothered producing PC games with Blu-ray discs well into the PS4/Xbox One era. Instead at best you got enough DVDs to hold the game or at worst a token DVD with just the installer.

Or just a USB drive. You can get a 128 GB flash drive for under $10; I'm sure it would be much less if buying in bulk.

Edit: A quick search shows some on AliExpress for $0.99.

AliExpress USB drives... sounds legit.

TL:DR; fake disks have controllers hacked to report 128GB or whatever, writing to them seems to work and opening the file would give you the first part of the file (so you can see the start of the movie or the song or read the first part of a text file) but the rest of the file will not be there...

Sure, I wasn't suggesting to order those exact ones.

If I was in a position of offering something of roughly 100 GB on physical media, I would spend more effort looking into it, but would expect something of roughly that price to be available.

The single-write aspect of DVDs/BDs is actually a selling point over the use of USB here.

>Edit: A quick search shows some on AliExpress for $0.99.

Nobody can buy 128 GB of flash for $1. They are fake, and will eat your data.

Ultra compression like Matt Hahoney has worked on and keeping the distribution to the source code, rather than built packages for all supported architectures, could probably squeeze this down onto 1 DVD. Debian doesn't really support truly antique computers any more, pretty much everything out there that it runs on now can compile everything it needs. Binary packages made a lot more sense when you were running Linux on a Zaurus with 16-32MB RAM which isn't enough to compile large programs or the kernel.

It looks like they also sell it on USB https://www.shoplinuxonline.com/debian-fullusb.html

If only we could invent an extremely cheap read only NAND chip.

That exists. Just tie the write-protect pin on most NAND after you're done writing to it.

looks like a 128gb usb flash drive $23

That USB has 21 isos on it. I wonder why they didn't just make it a giant bootable USB.

Maybe they don't know about the Ventoy software.

Ah, this brings back memories of Walnut Creek CD-ROM collections.

Damn! 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...

That brings back memories of ordering Linux distros by mail because downloading them over a dial-up modem was not practical.

Back 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.

This absolutely takes me back to the 90s.

Thanks from the fans of shiny physical media out there :)

They should sell DVD drives with it :D

USB optical drives are a thing.

Most PCs could boot off them starting long ago.

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