On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 13:25 -0500, Chris Gianelloni wrote: > > I struggled with catalyst for a couple of weeks and gave up. I > > personally have no need for a tool to make stages or package CDs or > > "Gentoo Release Media". For that matter, I have no need for a graphical > > installer. > > You have no need for a tool to make stages or "Gentoo Release Media", > but you spent a couple weeks playing with it? > > > My modus operandi in installing Gentoo is to do the appropriate stage3 > > install for the subarch, followed by loading the desktop from the > > appropriate package CD, followed by "emerge --sync; emerge -uvD --newuse > > world", followed by installing the add-on packages unique to my > > applications, scientific computing and algorithmic composition and > > synthesis of music. The whole process takes close to a full weekend on > > my ~ 1GHz P3 and Athlon T-bird. I've got it down to four "bash" scripts > > plus canned "/etc/fstab", etc. files, though, so I can sit and watch. > > Ahh... now I see why you played with catalyst. You were trying to ease > your effort in recreating your particular environment. > > > What I want from catalyst is the ability to make high-quality > > Gentoo-based LiveCDs easily ... to be blunt, as easily as a re-master of > > Knoppix can be made. The compromise I'm willing to make is that i686 or > > better is required. The compromises I'm *not* willing to make are the > > deletion of Fortran from the gcc set, since some of the software I use > > requires Fortran, and any less than the most comprehensive "just works" > > hardware detection available at any point in time on the resulting > > LiveCD. > > So what you want is the same thing the poster on gentoo-catalyst wanted, > for someone else to do all the work to match his specific needs when the > tool is already available and already capable of everything that he > wanted, but was too lazy to take the time to figure out? > > I'll be honest about something. We work on catalyst for ourselves. We > implement the features that we need to improve our lives in creating > "Gentoo Release Media". We do add other features to catalyst, as they > are requested, but we aren't gearing it towards end users, so we don't > spend time doing things we can't use, like making automated tools to do > work which would still require the same level of knowledge of the > internals of catalyst to use, but would do so graphically rather than a > fairly simple spec-file.
Maybe if I tell you what I'm trying to build, this will make more sense. I'm trying to build a LiveCD that comes up with Gentoo Linux the same way Knoppix and Knoppix derivatives come up with Debian, mostly testing but some unstable. The closest analogy to what I'm trying to do is Quantian. That's a remaster of clusterKnoppix with some things deleted and a plethora of mathematical, scientific, visualization and computational finance packages added. Like most Knoppix derivatives, if you like it, you can install it to hard disk and keep it current using the Debian apt tools. I got the impression from some other posts that Gentoo is heading in exactly this direction, and my assumption is that your release engineering tools will do this sometime in the not too distant future. My only problem is that I want to do it today. :) So maybe what I should be working on is shell or Perl scripts (Python is not one of my strong languages) for remastering an i686 Gentoo Release Media set, and a script to do a hard disk install. All that's missing from that is a dozen or so application packages and a desktop, and there's a lot of the GRP that I don't need. All I need is the i686 pre-compiled binaries for the packages used and a stage3 tarball, although the gcc in the stage3 would need to have at least Fortran and preferably all languages enabled. At some point, of course, I have to make the hard decisions about what to leave out to get a 700 MB result. Quantian took the coward's way out and switched to LiveDVDs. :) -- [email protected] mailing list
