Fenestrating the Handbook memstick section

Warren Block wblock at wonkity.com
Thu Feb 17 01:10:50 UTC 2011


On Mon, 14 Feb 2011, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:

>>> Finally, there's https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer, which is
>>> Image Writer for Windows or win32diskimager depending on how you look.
>>> Done by the Ubuntu folks.  GPLV2.  Easy to use.  The best option I've
>>> found so far.
>>
>> IMHO, this sounds like the easiest option for the end-user.
>>
>>> The questions:
>>>
>>> Is there a better Windows utility for writing a memory stick image?
>>>
>>> If we recommend Image Writer for Windows, seems like it would be polite
>>> to ask the project before taking advantage of their download capacity.
>>> Or would it be better to have a copy hosted on a FreeBSD server?
>>
>> I'm curious what the general consensus is on this last question myself.
>
> I don't know of a better one.
>
> I wouldn't worry too much about the downloads either.  It's a public web
> server, hosting a utility that is supposed to be *useful* to people.
>
> The number of FreeBSD users who will download this are going to be a
> _subset_ of all the users who install FreeBSD, so what sort of user are
> we looking at?  A few thousands every year?  I'm guessing pretty much
> any modern web server can handle that load and not even blink.

I did write to Michael Casadevall at the Win32DiskImager site a couple 
of weeks ago:

   > I'd like to mention it in the FreeBSD Handbook section on memory
   > stick usage, but wanted to check with you first:
   > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-pre.html#INSTALL-BOOT-MEDIA
   >
   > It may be possible to rehost at least the binary, so FreeBSD users
   > wouldn't be coasting on your bandwidth.  Maybe that's not a serious
   > concern.
   >
   > In any case, thanks for your work!

This was his reply (quoted with permission, which was delayed and why 
I hadn't posted this before):

"No problem here. Glad to know its useful :-). Since its hosted on
Launchpad, I'm not concerned with bandwidth but feel free to remirror
it if you want."

Given this, and the upcoming 8.2 release, I'd like to see the Handbook 
patched.  Just entered a PR with a proposed patch, docs/154837.


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