[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

[debian-knoppix] Debian package to bootstrap Knoppix (Was: variety of offers)



On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Robert Vanyi wrote:

> Reinventing the wheel... It's a really big problem anywhere in life...
> I have alredy reinvented the wheel many times, and I think I'm not the
> only one.
I'm quite new to this list and do not know how often the wheel was invented
before.  So I'll give it a try and I hope you keep in mind that:

      A triangular wheel is better than a quadratic one
      because it shakes one times less per turn. ;-)


On LinuxTag Chemnitz I had the idea that we could adopt the debootstrap
package (which builds a Debian chroot environment) for bootstrapping customized
Knoppix CDs.

I'm currently trying to derive a "knopootstrap" from debootstrap.
(Feel free to suggest a better name here - I'm not the best in finding names ...)
The idea is as follows:

  1. Make knopootstrap an official Debian package. So everybody running
     Debian could easily create Knoppix CDs.

  2. knopootstrap should install a base system and install some
     Knoppix specific debs into it.  These Knoppix specific debs should
     be hosted on a Knoppix mirror and should be included in the
        /etc/apt/sources.list
     for an easy update.  For sure these packages should be installed
     in the knopootstrap process.
     These Knoppix specific packages should contain all Knoppix specific
     stuff including the right dependencies.
     Perhaps some meta packages would make sense:

        knoppix-base:  Just the base system without X
        knoppix-x:     All stuff necessary to run an X session
        knoppix-kde:   All stuff necessary to run KDE
        knoppix-gnome: All stuff necessary to run Gnome

     For the sake of limited space on a CD a knoppix-kde might conflict
     to knoppix-gnome.

  3. Install your personal packages which you want to put onto the Knoppix CD
     via

           apt-get install <my packages>

  4. Build Knoppix ISO via a tool which should be provided by knopootstrap.

In my opinion this would make our live to create customized CDs as easy as
possible while making sure you always kan get the latest and greatest Knoppix
features because you are deriving the Knoppix stuff modularized from an
"official" Knoppix mirror with the knoppix-*.deb packages.  (Perhaps it
might make sense to make thees packages official Debian packages because
Debian has a plenty of mirrors all over the world - so why not using this
infra structure??)

What I have just done:

    http://people.debian.org/~tille/packages/knopootstrap/

    Well, this is just a *really* quick hack which does nothing else than
    debootstrap.  It is more or less a s/debootstrap/knopootstrap/ and
    disabling the feature to select different hardware architectures.

What has to be done (in my opinion):
Find some Knoppix experts (I do absolutely not count to this group of people,
but this might change in the future) who would like to take over the following
tasks:

   1. Caring for the repository of knoppix-*.deb packages.
      A first step could be to take the latest Knoppix and dpkg-repackage
      all non-official packages.  But I think it is more straightforeward
      to ask Klaus for these packages.  However, I would like to avoid
      extra workload for Klaus and thus hopefully someone else would step
      in here.

      If there would be consensus to make these packages official I would
      volunteer to sponsor these packages as long as the Knoppix-Deb-Master
      is no Debian developer.

   2. Enhancing the knopootstrap script (in the packages mentioned above)
      to install these knoppix packages, i.e. include
           cp knoppix.sources.list KNOPPIX/etc/apt/sources.list
           chroot KNOPPIX
           apt-get update
           apt-get install knoppix-<metapackage>
                  (metapackage could be given via commandline option or perhaps debconf)

   3. Write a Knoppix2ISO script which just contains all the steps which
      "Remastering Knoppix HowTos" talk about

   4. ???

Sorry for overflooding the list with this long mail.

Kind regards

         Andreas.

_______________________________________________
debian-knoppix mailing list
debian-knoppix@linuxtag.org
http://mailman.linuxtag.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-knoppix


Reply to: