Hi Ray On Thursday 29 November 2007 17:53, Ray Henry wrote: > I find this fascinating. Long years ago after some preliminary work by > Will at NIST, I authored a knoppix-emc CD and worked with Paul while > developing the Morphix (take the red pill) version that became the > debian BDI. A couple of things come to mind.
Minor correction - The Morphix base produced the BDI-live and laid the foundations for later work (Morphix also provided the original framework for Mr Shuttleworth's LiveCD, but that is another story).. > One of the concerns for me, being at the far end of many miles of very > old copper is that updating and maintaining a large install like the > ordinary Ubuntu is a time and resource consuming thing. At best I get > about 3k dribbling into the basement. One of the reasons that you always insisted on the development tools being available on the disk - How long does it take to download compilers, libraries, and assorted tools at 3K ? > I think our current raft of developers/leaders were wise to choose > Ubuntu. You sure about that - Ubuntu is little more than a snapshot of Debian's unstable branch (maybe with a few bug fixes)... If you really want to live on the edge, try tracking Sid and/or Experimental. > I didn't think so at the time but old dogs can occasionally > find new fire hydrants. Now that conjures up a few interesting metaphors.. Canines, lamp posts.. ;-/ > Ubuntu has most everything to satisify folk that are in process of migrating > from the PC crowd. As does SuSE, Red Hat, and countless other distros. Last time I tried SuSE (10.something), it looked pretty solid and did a better job of configuring the system than ubuntu. > It certainly fits with the release often line of thought and provides a nice > web path to keeping current -- if keeping current is your thing. I'll bet you quietly grumbled each time something broke, or you found upgrading X pulled in Y,Z, A through to F.... > Now to the heart of my initial thoughts regarding reconstructor. > Cleaning out unnecessary stuff after an install can be really time > consuming. Building a bootable CD can be really time consuming. *Was* time consuming - I build bootable images every day and each one takes between four and eighteen minutes. (scripted job taking a partial package list). Testing can take considerably longer, but modern hardware & qemu speeds that up. > A good CD building helper will reduce the size of the step required to get > into the business of building these disk images. If it works it can allow > us to offer several levels of install along the embedded -> full blown > continuum. As you rightly pointed out, cleaning out the post-install cruft is time consuming, and installation from a LiveCD gives the end user one of two options - Install everything the CD builder included (hacks and all), or no install. The LiveCD provides a good way to present an application for demonstration, but when it comes to a vehicle for installing, it lacks flexability. The poor user also ends up with any number of hacks and/or redundant cruft.. Just some of the reasons why I moved away from the LiveCD concept as an installation medium several years ago. If you want an install CD with all the latest bleeding edge packages, or the option to install a bare bones system on a SSD, we can do that. Want a choice between a lightweight window manager without the multimedia bloat, or a full blown Gnome/KDE plus bells'n'whistles, sure. Or how about Samba, wine, and the usual assortment of compilers & tools.. It kinda sounds like you have come full circle... Regards, Paul. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
