El Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 08:45:56AM +0100, Andreas Tille escribió: > On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Free Ekanayaka wrote: > > Considering now that DVD readers and burners are becoming cheaper and > > more popular, this issue might be partly solved in the near future. On > > http://www.debian-cd.com/ they already produce woody/sarge DVDs. > On the other hand I think that CDs are the most popular medium we should > care for and thus we should keeping a working CD solution in mind. Agreed, and for our purposes a DVD is only a bigger CD, the problems are the same, IMHO. > > Would a general, CDD independent, framework for automatically creating > > such ISO/DVD images make sense? For example there might be scripts on > > a server which take care of creating and updating such images > > according to the dependences of the task packages of a given CDD, or > > to some sort of rules defined inside in one of its task packages > > (e.g. debian-med-cd). > Yes this would definitely make sense and the problem can be split into > two flavours: > 1) A single CDD install CD for each CDD would be a nice thing to have. > I think the debian-edu project (=Skolelinux) is much in an advance > here. > > => We need tools to build such a CDD install CD Maybe the independent framework for building the install CDs makes sense, but I think we should investigate the posibility of building an official CD generator for Debian that includes support for this, seeing the full Debian Distribution as the CDD that includes everything. Probably we can start by looking at debian-cd and looking at the changes it needs to be able to build CDD installers. > 2) We need a (Knoppix derived) Live CD for demonstration purposes > for each CDD (see various threads on debian-devel and debian-knoppix > project on Alioth. > > => We need tools to build an easily customizable Knoppix CD which > can be builded from scratch by using Debian-Mirror and Debian tools > exclusively. I also agree here, but I think we can try to design a new system (and tools) to generate Debian LiveCDs instead of using Knoppix. As I see it, this system has to be based on current debian tools when possible (i.e., using the debian-installer hardware detection subsystem) and support the generation of LiveCDs (maybe with an installation option, but for me this is more like a cloning option) and Debian Installers (using the current system, with different frontends). If this last functionality is well implemented it can be used to generate the official CD installer, allowing the creation of X based installers simply by generating a small live system that includes X support and graphical frontends for debian-installer. Of course this doesn't excludes the console based installers, it only modifies the way the installer's root filesystem is built. > I consider 1) and 2) as different tasks because I doubt that you can get > a clean installation if you use the install feature from Knoppix. Moreover > a more or less unattended installation process (as Skolelinux is doing it > currently) is a vital feature and I doubt that we are able to combine this > with the Knoppix approach. For me, the Knoppix way of installation can be included as an option on the Debian LiveCDs, we only need to use the debian-installer partition system and once the disks are formated dump the LiveCD image and install a boot loader using the debian-installer tools. If we do it the right way, our image generator should not put anything in the root filesystem that is not in the debian packages, all the customizations used on the LiveCD should be done only modifying /etc files and can be distributed on a different place (as a simple option we could use a tar file that is uncompressed in RAM once the system is booted). Actually I don't have too much time to work on this issues, but as soon as I can I plan to write something and send it to Andreas for his paper and to this list for discussion. -- Sergio Talens-Oliag <sto@debian.org> <http://people.debian.org/~sto/> Key fingerprint = 29DF 544F 1BD9 548C 8F15 86EF 6770 052B B8C1 FA69
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