Re: Common Live CD base and generator (was: Educational Collaboration)

[Alex de Landgraaf <alextreme@xs4all.nl>]

Hey Peter and who it all concerns,

Havn't followed or seen the thread you mentioned, but I'd like to give a few
notes on where Morphix stands on autobuilding of our modules and livecd's as a
whole. Next time, could someone just CC morphix-devel? We welcome all new
ideas, help, critique and improvements, especially from Debian and other livecd
projects. Sorry if I've CC'ed you in error, but you'll live.

Minimodule-building is/can be automatic. Currently I just take a list of debian
packages [1], run a command and the resulting minimodule is ready. I don't have
to maintain these, but the process isn't perfect yet (translucency issues
mostly, which I'm working on, and the building could be somewhat neater). Check
out our lill' minimod-gen script, just keep in mind it's a proof-of-concept. I
have been working separatly on a way to both autobuild working minimodules and
the ability to integrate these neatly into the dpkg archive/extract the
packages from the minimodule again. Think about them as a form of
meta-packaging that can be overlaid onto livecds in a matter of seconds.

Mainmodule-buidling, basemodule-building will be my/our next step. I did start
on a wrapper using debootstrap, there would be different recipies (simplified
scripts?) to create different main/base modules. This again would be done using
apt-get, but would have to be interactive (debconf et al).

On the creation of livecd's on a whole, this would be done for morphix-based
livecds using either some scripts like those in bootcd, mklivecd or something
similar. However, I'd rather go all the way.
I did start work on a GTK2 GUI for piecing modules together called isomorphgui
[2], but havn't been hacking on it for a few months. It uses an XML file [3]
from a central server, downloads the necessary modules, checks md5sum and in
the future would check GPG keys of both the XML file and the modules. The DTD
is still in development. Ideally, you would have the option of building the
above modules from scratch, or maybe using a second program instead.
Isomorphgui should _not_ be used yet, but it too is an interesting
proof-of-concept for the personal-livecd future :)

Cheers, and if anyone is interested all our code is available via CVS on
morphix.org!

Alex de Landgraaf

[1] http://am.xs4all.nl/morphix/minilist/
[2] http://am.xs4all.nl/gfx/isomorphgui.png
[3] http://am.xs4all.nl/morphix/morphinfo.xml

Quoting p.carsten@arcor.de:

<snip bunch of livecd stuff>
> As far as I could tell jigdo does not work with filesystems at all at the
> moment, it reasembles the iso from chunks of data. As a frontend it would
> need a separate tool for local live CD creation. But there are already some!
> The ones I found are listed at: http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?LiveCD
> 
> 
> I just read though this thread[1] at debian-devel about including knoppix
> things in debian. Just like you also wrote the general problem of
> customizing
> the configuration came up too. And for that I'd picture to use CFG[2]
> and packaged meta-config definitions.
> 
> Peter
> 
> [1]
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/debian-devel-200311/msg01501.html
> 
> [2]
> http://freedesktop.org/Main/CFG



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| Alex de Landgraaf            | The cure for boredom is curiosity |
| Student AI & CS, VU, A'dam   |  There is no cure for curiosity   |
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