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Austin wrote:
> The attendance was very good, the interest level was very very good, and
> the response was AMAZING.  Many people asked questions both after the
> lecture and throughout the rest of the day.  It seems that there is a
> definite desire for people to be able to easily make their own
> specialized live CD's by themselves.

That's the whole point of mklivecd. I have made 3 different live CDs,
none of which would be useful to a wide audience (one is only useful
internally for running simulations on machines that *have* to run only
Windows during work hours, but can be booted off the liveCD after hours
to have a crude computing cluster for some proprietary 1d CFD software),
but which really provide real-world functionality.

> I have put up the slides from the presentation, but they do not depict
> WHAT I said, only an outline of the topic matter.
> http://groundstate.ca/freechem-pres.pdf

You can now remove your "con" #3 "local printing is tricky", since this
seems to be fixed in cvs (except for some issue with the GNOME menus
being in /var/lib AND HAVING SPACES IN THE [EMAIL PROTECTED]). In my test,
all you need to do is run printerdrake, and it should auto-detect any
local printer and work without any intervention.

NVIDIA support is apparently also there, we're looking at some
bootsplash progress support, and I'm fighting with getting ide-scsi
working correctly (which seems a bit tricky ...).

>
> One of the coolest ideas I got was from a guy who suggested that USB
> memory cards be used as the /home directory.  This is a brilliant
> idea... as you could walk around with the liveCD, and your USB memory
> card, and you would essentially have your desktop in your pocket, that
> would run on almost any workstation anywhere, with your /home/.hidden
> files and everything.  It would be cool if the liveCD startup script
> would automatically mount the USB memory card as /home if it was
> inserted before boot time, but as /mnt/usbram (or similar) if inserted
> after bootup.

There is initial support for this in CVS, but since I misplaced my USB
flash disk about a week ago I haven't been able to test it.

I would personally like an encrpyted filesystem, and a tool to prepare
such a filesystem.

On the CD we use for simulation, I just have it set up for our LDAP
server (I should test with _ldap._tcp SRV records to make it more
generic), and have autofs starting at boot, and now any user can log
into it and get their home directory via automounted NFS (with one extra
step before creating the image - but direct mount support in autofs
would remove the need for this).

> I'm planning on finishing freechem 1.0 (possibly to be renamed), and
> distributing it through the authors of the chemistry applications
> themselves.  Then I plan on making an audio production liveCD, but I'm
> waiting for cooker to re-open first, so I can update jack, alsa-tools,
> and a few other things.

You might want to at least do some tests at present for hardware
detection purposes ... since that may also take some time to sort out.

BTW, if others are interested in this, please join the mklivecd mailing
list:
https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/minicd-scripts

Regards,
Buchan

- --
|--------------Another happy Mandrake Club member--------------|
Buchan Milne                Mechanical Engineer, Network Manager
Cellphone * Work            +27 82 472 2231 * +27 21 8828820x202
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