[fedora-india] Kobold Project

[Khushbu Mohta]

Hi Everyone,
As part of the Summer Training[1] organised by Kushal Das[2] and other
Durgapur LUG[3] Team-members at IRC channel #dgplug, I along with my
colleague Prakhar Agarwal have worked on Kobold Project [4]. We were
suggested this project by Rahul Sundaram(mether).

*About Kobold:*
Kobold is minimalistic tool for automated Fedora Live CD installation on USB
stick in a sequential manner. It uses HAL and D-Bus to discover USB stick
plugging and livecd-iso-to-disk for the actual installation process.
*
Some pitfalls*:
(1) It was sequential.
(2) It could only work on a Single USB stick at a time with hassles of
plugging-in and plugging-out the USB sticks if more than one USB stick need
to be used.
(3) The USB sticks had to be plugged-in after initiating the script. The
script was not able to detect already plugged-in USB sticks.

*Our Tweaks:*
First of all, we eradicated the need to plug-in the USB sticks after
initiating the script. That is, we added the functionality of detecting
already plugged-in USB storage devices.

Secondly, the installation process is changed from sequential to parallel.
We have incorporated threading concept by using "threading" module to enable
installation process on multiple USB sticks simultaneously.

Code is available at
http://dgplug.org/training/trunk/khushbu/Kobold/kobold3.py

*Usability/Benefits*:
The Install-fests will be much more fun. Just plug-in all the USB storage
devices, run the script and you will have Fedora installed in all of them
within no time!! No need to wait for the installation process to get over
with one stick and then plug-in another.


*References:*
[1] http://wiki.dgplug.org/index.php/SummerTraining
[2] http://kushaldas.in
[3] http://dgplug.org
[4] http://trac2.assembla.com/kobold-project

We hope that we have been able to contribute in some way. We wish to add
this code to LiveUSB-Creator(which works on a single USB drive right now)
and for that we need your comments/feedback. Thank You!

-- 
Khushbu Mohta
khushi.pk at gmail.com
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