Hi Dave
Going to copy the group on this for extra thoughts and input. Sorry I missed the last meeting as well, I had some time off and completely forgot ;-o
Sorry I kind of fell silent on this the last couple of weeks but it's not out of idleness on the matter. I've looked into loads of options but didn't get the wiki updated with these yet. I'm disgusted that I can't find a hard disk installer on ANY of the Ubuntu LiveCD variations, the exception being Beatrix (which is still based on Hoary while TheOpenCD is based on Breezy (minus the installer).
Breezy Badger problems
Installer: I'd been looking at the possibility of rewriting the Beatrix installer to install TheOpenCD which shouldn't be too hard, but if anyone else was interested (and a better and more practiced programmer) it doesn't look hard.
DHCP: I think the Breezy version on TheOpenCD has this problem fixed. Basically booting with a network card, but NO NETWORK CONNECTION caused the DHCP to hang at boot time, this despite supposedly accepting a 'disable dhcp' option at the boot prompt. Just something we'd have to make sure was fixed.
GOTCHAs If we're replacing any of the optional content, we'd need to make sure XScreensaver isn't pointing at a directory we remove. This was a problem on the GUADEC Germany 2005 cd.
ALTERNATIVELY TO ALL OF THE ABOVE
Among the many things I looked at, I was most impressed by Mutagenix (FreeRock Gnome). LiveCD, installer and a beautifully configured desktop. The gware Gnome CD didn't appeal to me as much. I'm VERY partial to all variations of slackware for the purposes of Live CDs because they are a complete doddle to remaster, and most even come with remaster scripts as well. If not, http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip certainly has.
My next move was to suggest Mutagenix FRG as an option on the wiki. CD weighs in at: Jul 07 2005 20:38 570927104 mutagenix_frgnome-2.6.11.8-i486-1.iso Downloadable from: ftp://mirror.datapipe.net/norlug/mutagenix/2.6.11.8-1/
I've been using it for the best part of a week on an 128mb laptop and it hums along lovely, plenty of apps and no stability problems.
If you want to investigate the LiveCD based on my pain, go right ahead. Can't claim to have found all the 'gotchas' but those were the obvious ones. But if there is a need to go through a messy remastering progess, Slackware variants are a much better option. You can do 'installpkg -root=/whatever' to customise to your hearts content and burn the result with a shell script. I'm hoping to do this on the bank holiday weekend coming up. Keep in touch!
Mel
Was there any talk of the CD during the last meeting? TheOpenCD now with the included bootable distro seems to do exactly what we had planned ours to do. Do we continue development when there is a clear alternative? Do we just produce a modified version of TheOpenCD? Do we stick to our plan and build our own?
My DVDR refuses to work so I'm gonna have to buy a new one.
Dave
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