[Fedora-livecd-list] Moving forward with Fedora LiveCD

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Steve Grubb wrote:

> On Tuesday 05 July 2005 07:05, Darko Ilic wrote:
> >         The toolkit would include three separate tools:
> >          - a tool for generating config files that hold the list of
> > packages that should be included in Live CD distribution (in kickstart-like
> > format), - a tool that installs specified packages in the specified
> > directory (and also check dependencies),
> >          - a tool that makes bootable iso image out of that directory
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I've created the rookery build system which does the above. I'd like to go 
> over some things that I've learned along the way.
> 
> 1) Package selection: where would the initial list come from? Do the
> rpms need to be on the machine or can yum fetch them? Do you want to
> have any filters to quickly weed out packages like devel? Can missing
> dependencies be found at this stage?
> 
> 2) Installation: The technique employed by the rookery is to use dd to create 
> a file of the right size and then mount it via loopback. What fs options are 
> available here? ext3, ext2? The other problem is what can be jettisoned to 
> bring the size down? I usually dump all the language translations. It wastes 
> a lot of precious space. This would need to be user selectable. It is really 
> important for us to find things that can be deleted to bring the size down.
> 
> 3) image inspection. Usually people want to stop after image creation
> and hand tune things. Maybe they want to add pam options, tighten
> security, set IP Tables config, etc.
> 
> 4) The big item...does it boot? Assuming all the above goes well, this is 
> where people usually have problems. There are modifications necessary for the 
> init scripts. You either need an overlay file system or a tmpfs for all 
> directories that are writable. Should the CD automatically look at floppy or 
> usb for saved session/override data? Should it utilize any swap partition on 
> the hard disk should it find one?
> 
> 5) Once up and running, can users have yum install more packages? syslog 
> should be modified so that its a fifo keeping only 32k of data. Other things 
> that log need similar customizations.
> 
> 6) Shutdown, how do you export data on the way down? Should it eject the CD? 
> Besides exporting data, does it really need to do anything on the way down?
> 
> The rookery system does a lot of this already. I'm sure some of the other 
> projects could help flesh out the above issues. I see this project having a 
> lot of parellism. Somebody can be working on package selection and someone 
> else working on booting without interfering with each other.
> 
> Maybe what we need is to draw up a document that breaks the project out into 
> all these steps, fill in the concerns/requirements/strategies, and let people 
> dive into the various chunks.

Looks like you've just started it.  :)

My guess: in the IRC meeting this week (which I hope everyone can attend,
since almost no one has acked or nacked, hint hint) we begin this
discussion in earnest.

--g

_____________________  ____________________________________________
  Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have
 Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent.  the
             Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the 
                     ] [ dumb.  --mcluhan