[Fedora-livecd-list] Expectation Setting

[Skunk Worx]

Jane Dogalt wrote:
> 
> --- Skunk Worx <skunkworx at verizon.net> wrote:
>  
> If generating live cds that are as functional and useful as knoppix isn't the
> ultimate goal of kadischi, what is?  Generating read only boot media for a
> specific system?

Your last sentence is exactly why our project, and at least one other 
(he's on the list somewhere...) use kadischi exclusively. Not really 
interested in a debate, so I'm just snipping the rest and telling my own 
story.

Prior to kadischi I eval'd knoppix and the ADIOS project.

Knoppix was problematic. The package set and the arcane build/modify 
instructions made it impossible for us to develop on hard drive and 
deploy on DVD. Things may have changed now; that was 18 months ago. None 
of our drivers would consistently build across kernels, it was difficult 
or impossible to sync kernels on debian stable (develop and test on hard 
drive) and knoppix (deploy). The package sets on debian were often 1-1/2 
years behind fedora...we'd read about a technology and there was no way 
to get it working on debian stable.

The ADIOS project was similar. Difficult to keep kernels sync'd between 
Fedora and ADIOS. Squashfs was nice, but ultimately we had too many 
problems keeping up with patching and building kernels, and soon tired 
of the hassle of downloading "only rev x.x" from whatever website. They 
never really supported FC4, and they have now (AFAIK) ceased development.

Kadischi made everything so nice. We have a local yum repo, and the 
develop, test, deploy phases are all on the same software platform 
(currently FC4), same kernel version, etc. It's a godsend.

When our customers want to revert, they put in the old DVD. When they 
want to try the new one, just boot it. No more software "dll hell".

This project (no relation to mine) :

http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/

...has a live dvd music composition distribution they sell based on 
debian. I suspect they don't have to deal with custom device drivers to 
the extent we do. I think this kind of thing is the wave of the future.

To date our company has made about 4 official releases and 10 unofficial 
test releases, and shipped about 100 DVDs. We use unattended, automatic 
scripts and kickstart to gen our iso's.

In a few years we expect to be shipping 250 Fedora based, 
kadischi-generated dvds every 6 months. Not much, but they are part of 
an integrated lab measurement system. We sell systems, not software.

---
John