The Makefiles in the unionfs branch now create a working proof-of-concept livecd. The difference from traditional livecds is that any file on this CD can be edited and even deleted until the reboot. This obsoletes the task of identifying and symlinking into /etc files that the user may have to edit (e.g. Polish users have to replace iso8859-1 with iso8859-2 in all fonts.alias files, and there are many more cases we don't expect or don't know about).
This CD also incorporates some changes that simplify its use for non-English speakers. This is achieved by removing programs that require any language-specific configuration besides setting the LANG variable. E.g., this is why fluxbox (non-working for Russians out of the box) has been replaced with xfce. Only locales with 8-bit encodings and left-to-right writing order are expected to work, not UTF-8. Jeremy Huntwork said that he wants to move that branch into trunk and release this CD together with the LFS-6.1 book, but there are three showstoppers: 1) Most applications are unconfigured. E.g., the xfce menu has to be populated, lynx has to be made locale-friendly, and so on. This also applies to the trunk. 2) There is a bug with mounting tmpfs: the "size=90%" option in /init (in initramfs) seems to be ignored. 3) Total size of all tmpfs instances exceeds the RAM size, making it easy to cause a kernel panic. Testers are needed in order to identify other problems. The buildscripts for the livecd can be checked out from SVN: svn co svn://svn.linuxfromscratch.org/livecd/branches/unionfs/ Also there is a need to bring the README file and its translations from the previous livecd up to date. I'll start a separate thread when the contents of the English README file are decided upon. Besides that, there is a plan to create the "console autoconfigurator". I want to be able to boot linux as e.g. "linux LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R" and have the proper screen font and keymap set for me automatically. However, implementation of this feature requires your help. I just don't know the mapping between LANG values and proper console settings for all languages. Please submit your LANG variable and the contents of /etc/sysconfig/console file that works for you. Otherwise, I will have to guess. -- Alexander E. Patrakov -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/livecd FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
