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cdlinux progress report and roadmap



i cc'ed to debian-boot, 'cause I think there would be somebody
interest in cdlinux too. in short, the goal of cdlinux is to be the
most flashy cd installation method for debian gnu/linux. and a demo on
live cd without installation. by cd installation mathod, i mean all of
the flexibilities cd installation could provide. Ie. choosing
indivisual packages to install unto harddisk. etc. and even more. the
most flashy one, i mean, more flashy than mandrake. and people won't
miss the loss of stormix. debian rulez.

hi,

i'm very surprised that i've had around 120 downloads at
sourceforge. (i'm sorry, the download are very badly organized) so, i
feel i'd better write my ideas on cdlinux here to share with you.

i will probably abandon the c version of the linuxrc code, and move to
the debian busybox, at least this gives a better integration to the
overall debian project. as time permits, i will finish this move in
early may.

and this gives me a chance to move to 2.4 way of doing things like
devfs and pivot_root. i hope i could catch up before debian freezes
the base section of the next release. aka. woody. though this probably
means i abandon all of my code now. ;)

after the move, i will use rootskel from debian-installer cvs, and use
busybox as primary part of initrd. i would write some busybox applets
if necessary. but i hope simple shell scripts will do.

i have the chroot environment for burning the cd almost ready, it's
trivial but it's too big to upload. only some small tricks involved,
to let me using cramfs images on cdrom then loop mount them when
system starts. this is almost there. if i got any response from you, i
will write down the detailed specification of this chroot environment
for the first cd of cdlinux. it's really trivial.

basically, we have the busybox to do the pivot_root, then loop mount
15 also cramfs images on /bin /sbin /usr etc. with / on ramdisk, and
all writable stuffs symlinked to /r_etc /r_var etc. etc. if in doubt,
make me write more clearly. :)

that said. with minor tweaks. we will have a runnable system on
cdrom. running xserver-fbdev, very slow, very, very slow. but it maybe
is faster on your machines. you have 512M, do you? ;)

after that, we have all of the GUI goodies ready, Gtk, Qt,
mozilla/XUL, whatever, now we could use them to write a beautiful
installation method for debian. this won't catch up with woody
release, if we do, i will be very, i mean, very surprised.

two things to note.

1. where are the debs?

we may need a deb virtual filesystem. i don't like dpkg-repack,
because the overhead. and we may probably have no place to put the
repacked deb. remember we only have ram to write on?

to the gurus, a deb filesystem is probably trivial. i'm not a guru,
but i will try. if nobody volunteer, or anybody comes with better
idea. this will take me a month to write i guess. then we will have it
ready in early july maybe. no waranty. ;)

2. some chroot tricks.

GUI program will running on CD, but it will fork dpkg running chroot
on harddisk. harddisk would be formated in prior by other
program. this is doable. as far as i can see for now. we still need a
base.tgz, though. i roughly remember that someone on debian-boot
mentioned that they don't need base.tgz, i really want to know the
details. um, now think apache etc, chroot things maybe not that easy.

after all this, i hope we could catch up in later this year, shortly
after the woody release. now i think it's obivious why i have the
confidence this would be the most flash and flexible cd installation
method. 'cause we will have a real (around 650M * 3, due to cramfs)
linux system around, when doing installation things. and we have all
the real debs by hand, ready. (instead of udebs.) where is quake? you
still don't know? ;)

and if the speed of xserver-fbdev is really a concern, we may run
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 when root first time login.

we'll-be-the-best-in-all-arenas-ly,
zw
-- 
http://dim.sourceforge.net ............... Debian Chinese Input Method
http://njlug.sourceforge.net ............ NanJing GNU/Linux User Group
http://cdlinux.sourceforge.net ........... Debian running on Live! CDs
http://people.debian.org/~zw ...................... XEmacs Screenshots



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