Re: Draft proposal for debian-custom
Quoting Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>:
> > In case of live-cd, just ask Alextreme :), but he seems to agree with
> > the above scheme.
> Because I do not know about Morphix it would be great if someone could
> compare the work of Alextreme with the way which is describet at
>
> http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/ch-todo.en.html#s-liveCD
>
> and in how far we should enhance this documentation.
Well, currently I've been basicly working here at debconf on the #2 from debix:
autobuilding. #1 is already possible, but a bit messy (we just want to take a
list of debian packages from one or more repositories and have them work from a
livecd). The module-autobuilding framework is done and I've been keeping myself
busy making various modules from packagelists, still some (nasty) issues to
deal with in respect to the 2.6 kernels.
The description on Morphix that is in the current CDD documentation is the
'default text' from the users point of view. On the inside, Morphix is pretty
different from other livecds (well, Slax has borrowed some ideas).
Morphix is modular. The base of morphix is a 30MB iso, containing the kernel,
kernel modules and hardware detection tools. It is built from a debootstrap,
knoppix's hwsetup/data packages and contains a range of morphix/knoppix
scripts. It is severely slimmed down, I've been thinking of making udeb's for
the base instead.
The base checks the various available media for mainmodules: these can be seen
as compressed debian installs without kernel or configuration. The latter is
autodetected and copied over from the base into the mainmodule, and after some
binding the mainmodule is chroot'ed into. This is your 'livecd' environment.
It's possible to have multiple mainmodules on a livecd: the user is prompted to
choose which one to load in that case.
Each mainmodule has (packaged) initscripts in /morphix/init.d,
deliberately separate from the normal debian initscripts as a lot of the normal
debian boot procedure isn't necessary when booting from the livecd (or is done
very differently). Besides from a separate package for the init scripts, all
packages in mainmodules (ought to be) normal debian packages.
Anyway, this was a short introduction from a debian perspective. There are
other
aspects to morphix (minimodules, installing, which is pretty easy from the
chroot), if anyone at debconf wanting to hear/ask/flame about them just join
the Custom Debian Bootable CD's session [1] on Wednesday or drop on by at the
Debian-NP lab. There's a lot of technical documentation on our wiki [2],
morphix.org has some howtos on adapting morphix. Autobuilding modules is fairly
new, would like to work some more on it these next few days but anyone
interested is welcome to check out the mmaker CVS repository [3].
> Is this talk anywhere available. I see many things in common to
> Componentized Linux and hope that we could share a certain amount of work.
Not yet (the talk), however PICAX is pretty interesting. We've actually used
their comps.xml syntax for our autobuild templates. The main feature of CL is
the combining of packages into components that can in turn depend on each
other.
For CDD and world domination!
Alex
[1] http://www.debconf.org/debconf4/bagunca#npday
[2] http://am.xs4all.nl/phpwiki/
[3] http://am.xs4all.nl/phpwiki/index.php/ModuleMaker
/------------------------------------------------------------------\
| Alex de Landgraaf | The cure for boredom is curiosity |
| Student AI & CS, VU, A'dam | There is no cure for curiosity |
| Phone: 06-16844084 | |
| GPG: http://am.xs4all.nl/key_alex.asc /'-'\ |
| www.alextreme.org & www.morphix.org ( o o ) |
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