Re: Live CD for FOSDEM?

[Nicolas Roard]

On Jan 29, 2008 9:32 PM, Riccardo Mottola <multix@ngi.it> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> >> I think the only choice right now is the GNUSTEP LiveCD (I can  never
> >> remember who creates it)
> >
> > I think it was Gürkan Sengün http://www.linuks.mine.nu/gnustep/ but  he
> > seems to be the only one working on it so its not as "polished" as  the
> > Étoilé Live CD was.
> >
> >> which is actually just Debian Unstable.  Last I checked, Debian has  a
> >> Camaelon package so theming it isn't hard.
>
> I think the ideal solution would be tho have a separate Etoile and GNUstep 
> cd, so to be able to show-off a "clean" gnustep. Actually I think (also my 
> reading Quentin's answer) that eotile adds to the gnustep base so that it 
> should be abel to do one main work and then etoile can add to the base. THis 
> would save efforts.

The etoile livecd was configured with a "gnustep" account, starting
windowmaker, using the NeXTSTEP look, etc.

> Using just debian usntable has a big disadvantage: it ties us quite a bit to 
> their packages and it is not possible easily for us to include more up to 
> date packages or, for example, even add unreleased sutff just for demo and 
> show-off purposes.
>
> Basing on debian for example, wil inhibit building of simplewebkit and 
> Vespucci, SWK browser... which should be really demonstrated.
>
> The same goes for some unreleased stuff or ProjectCenter, where we need the 
> latest SVN version to build against current make and also to build several 
> projects, 0.4.3 can't cope with that..

What I realized when working on the live cd was, as it was based on
ubuntu, the simplest thing was to:
- get a base ubuntu (eg base libs + x11 + libs gnustep needs)
- install gnustep and the rest by hand, directly on the image cd.
iirc quentin's scripts did the same thing (but better as automatized).
The only bad thing with this method is that the resulting image was
rather big... but I'm sure with cleaning a bit more the packages (eg
removing the ones not useful) you could drop the size quite a bit. The
advantage is that you can leverage all the work made on ubuntu. The
other disadvantage possibly is that it can be annoying to install all
the gnustep apps by hand (though really it's usually trivial); but one
simple solution would be to have deb packages for gnustep (either
custom ones or the default ones from debian) and only install by hand
the gnustep apps that are not up to date as deb packages or that don't
have packages.

Anyway, just reminding that it really is not a huge undertaking to
make a livecd that way, and fixing whatever needs to be fixed on
quentin's scripts would make things even simpler.

-- 
Nicolas Roard
"Java, the best argument for Smalltalk since C++ " -- Frank Winkler