Re: Live Media

[Daniel Baumann <daniel@debian.org>]

Sebastian Hilbert wrote:
> non-standard repositories
> openSUSE: all packages in openSUSE buildservice can be included
> Debian: a custom sources list for apt needs to be carefully crafted

as someone else already explained, actually creating a repository is
very easy. if you don't want to do that, you can just copy your packages
into config/chroot_local-packages and be done with it - no need for an
extra repository just to have the packages installed.

a custom repository is of course more flexible, easier to maintain and
allows to select packages out of it.

> custom files
> Debian: can be manually supplied in target directories, it is kind of hard for 
> me to track when changes need to happen 

ideally, even such files are packaged as a .deb package. if you don't
want to do that, you can keep your config_chroot-local-files in a VCS
repository, or your complete config/. that should do it, or am i
missing/missunderstanding something?

> building
> Debian: available in multiple formats but kind of hard to produce for me, did 
> not bother with anything but iso image

generation of iso, usb-hdd, or netboot images do all work the absolutely
same way - just select what you want with the -b parameter to lh_config.

if resources permits it on live.debian.net; live-webhelper (a cgi to
live-helper) will be enabled again for the public though.

> testing
> Debian: needs to be downloaded and fed to some virtualization solution as 
> virtual or physical CD

brandon has a really cool setup with qemu that creates a video of
booting the images (check the archives for 'autotesting'). this needs
quite some work to be properly package the scripts and bits needed to
make it work, which i prefered not to do before lenny release has happened.

> sharing
> Debian: needs to be hosted by us

sadly, we're living in a world where large webspace, and live images
including their sources are generally quite large, is not for free.

i'm afraid that the ressources available to me are limited and do not
allow to host other images as well. especially because there would be so
many usefull other images and image combinations, not just gnumed, and i
would need to make a decision which few i could host.

besides, just hosting live.debian.net costs me personally ~800CHF per
year, that i pay myself and which i do since february 2006 and where i'm
not generating any revenue from. i'm locking into getting a box
sponsored by a Swiss ISP soon though.

> One media for 1) live demoing 2) installing of the image to a harddisk 3) 
> installing the software to the system.

1 and 2 can be combined by including live-installer
(LH_DEBIAN_INSTALLER=live resp. --debian-installer live). 3 can be
acchieved through config/chroot_local-includes.

> I envision something like placing local repositories for Debian , openSUSE, 
> Windows on the CD. A webpage would detect the OS (just like our download 
> pages do) and of the installation of the software and its dependencies. 

that would be nice. as soon as you have it, just put it into
config/chroot_local-includes and make sure you also include an
autorun.inf for the windows users and you're done. probably you would
also need a trivial script to merge the two livecds (opensuse and debian
one).

Regards,
Daniel

-- 
Address:        Daniel Baumann, Burgunderstrasse 3, CH-4562 Biberist
Email:          daniel.baumann@panthera-systems.net
Internet:       http://people.panthera-systems.net/~daniel-baumann/