Hell Oh Entropy!

Life, Code and everything in between

Fedora 21 Workstation DVDs

Fedora 21 was released on 9th December in a whole new packaging in the form of various products. Us APAC ambassadors had discussed earlier about the kind of media we would need to write and it was finally decided that APAC will get its DVDs from EMEA, who were getting a good deal on writing a large number of Fedora 21 Workstation DVDs. We found an even better deal in India though and for that we decided to write our own media locally.

The only problem was actually procuring quotes and deciding on the best (and not necessarily cheapest) one since almost all quotes we got were cheaper than the EMEA quotes. I narrowed the quote down to Gaiaka Media Works, who have good and affordable optical media solutions. I had a cheaper quote from a provider in Delhi, but they were not even close to being as responsive and had refused to provide any kind of samples. Gaiaka on the other hand were constantly in touch with me right up to the point of delivery, so the vendor decision was quite easy in the end.

Delivery however was complicated. I had initially asked for the shipment to be delivered to my place in Pune, but that would have made it by 22nd or 23rd. Pravin Satpute however announced the Fedora 21 release party in Mumbai for 21st and he wanted DVDs to distribute there. Thus started a complicated delivery dance. I was to go to Delhi via Mumbai on 20th, so I personally picked up the shipment from the Gaiaka office. This was a good decision for a different reason - I got to meet the owner personally and even gave him a server and workstation DVD to try out. I kept the boxes at a friend’s place and gave a couple of spindles to Rahul Bhalerao at the Dadar station, who then got those DVDs to the Mumbai release party. I then returned to Pune on 23rd, went back to Mumbai over the following weekend (for a friend’s wedding) and finally got the DVDs back home yesterday. Phew!

Along the way, I shipped a couple of DVDs to a 13 year old who emailed me (and pinged me repeatedly on IRC) for a Fedora DVD since he did not have enough bandwidth at home to download a DVD image.

The worst problem however was (and still is) the DVD sleeves. I have been pursuing printers around Pune for some time now but none of them seem to be interested enough to even call back. All of them seem to be too busy to want more business. The result is that none of the DVDs have sleeves now. We’re not considering it a bug problem though, since a lot of people I spoke to didn’t seem to care much for the sleeves. They are good to have (prettiness factor) but not absolutely necessary.

So to conclude, I am now a custodian of approximately 1700 Fedora 21 workstation DVDs and will be sending about half of them to the Bangalore Red Hat office this week. If you are hosting a release party or are a Fedora contributor or ambassador attending an event, let me know (through the fedora-india or ambassadors mailing list) how many DVDs you need and we can work out a way to get them to you. I also have about 1000 Server product DVDs, but we (i.e. APAC ambassadors) still need to decide how to distribute those around APAC. I would personally like to distribute multiboot DVDs in future, so hopefully we can come to some kind of consensus on that before F22.

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