[Fedora-spins] Help creating a spin

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm working as an intern with the Open Rights Group this summer, and my
> personal project for the next six weeks is to create a spin of Fedora
> that is going to be bundled with lots of free content, promoting the
> importance of the public domain and a vibrant commons, and then sent out
> to MPs (members of parliament). 
> 
> Kanarip said if I stopped by here people would be able to help me out
> with the spin side of it? I think we're going to use the standard Fedora
> live disc as our basis, and then we want to add symlinks on the desktop
> to the media folders that will be kept on the root of the disc. As well
> as this we're going to want to autostart Firefox and have it open up a
> copy of a local web page that will help to provide context to the
> content, as well as navigation. 
> 
> What do you guys think, will you be able to help out? Even a few links
> pointing me in the right direction will be a huge help as it's a big
> project even without the live cd.
> 

Hey Jon,

good to see you here ;-)

First of all this is one of the very important use-cases where I would 
like to see the external, non-Fedora content not cause us to require you 
to rebrand anything.

Second, you are going to need to make sure that the packages are not 
consuming too much space, so basing your live spin off of an existing 
spin will probably require you to remove some of the packages in that 
spin. If you use the kickstart in Revisor, use the --report-sizes 
command line switch (even if you start the GUI) to make it report the 25 
most space consuming packages, allowing you to efficiently remove 
packages requiring the most space accordingly.

Third, if you create a new user on your system, and set it up the way 
you want it (autostarting Firefox with a certain page, shortcuts on the 
desktop, etc.), log out and back in to your own user account. Then, copy 
every file you want to be on the live media into a tree such as:

/tmp/home/user/.gconf
/tmp/usr/lib/firefox-1.X/whateverplugin.so

Then, use Revisor's copy_dir setting to copy the tree, in this case 
/tmp, right onto what is going to be the live system root directory.

Hope this helps!

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen