[Fedora-livecd-list] What is kadischi capable of ?

Jane Dogalt jdogalt at yahoo.com
Fri Dec 1 16:11:33 UTC 2006


--- Andy Trayford <andrew.trayford at bakbone.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I've been a watcher here for a while now, and have also tried out
> kadischi on FC5.
> 
>  
> 
> What I really need and think a liveCD generation tool should offer is
> as
> follows:
> 
>  
> 
> -          Bootable customised version of chosen distribution
> 
> -          Ability to make the distribution as "Light" or
> minimalistic
> as possible.
> this includes chopping down an X solution (i.e. XFCE/fluxbox) as
> small
> as possible.

I totally agree.  Back when my unreleased livecd generating tool was
based on mandrake-7.0 and urpmi, I accomplished this using the the
'minimal' install option (I think redhat might have also had this in
the distant past).  I actually had X+windowmaker+xmms+firefox in <100M,
so that it could fit on a 3" CDR with some space left over for your
mp3s.

I do plan on targeting the same type of thing with my as-yet purely
vaporware tool.  Though these days I might be happy if I can get <1G
leaving some room to spare on a 1G usb drive, or 3" dvdr.  


> 
> -          Total package choice independancy without having to
> install
> buckets of dependencies.

Thats just yum, and a general critique of dependency 'bugs' in fedora. 
If you can find specific packages that don't really depend on something
else, and can figure a better way to package them, I'd guess fedora
would adopt your build patch in a heartbeat.

> 
> -          Media delivery options: USB / CD / DVD.

Or even PXE, QEMU, and general tgz images, perhaps with a way to push
those images on a local or remote system.   But you listed the
important ones.

> 
> -          Cross Platform: PowerPC (IBM & Mac), X86, X86-64, Solaris,
> Itanium (efi).
> By Cross Platform I mean ability to produce same configuration on all
> Distro supported architecture.

Yup.  Maybe even the ability to make a single image that can boot
multiple arches???  I wonder if you can make a bootable iso that boots
both ppc and i386.  I think I've heard rumors of that in the past.

> 
> -          Minimal or no boot menu's: i.e. complete hardware auto
> detection or Menu customisation.

I totally agree.  I call this 'physically portable linux'.  I.e. your
workstation on your ipod, and it 'just works' when you take your
workstation with you.  Honestly though, just disabling fc6's firstboot,
gets you pretty close these days.  Maybe with an Xorg -configure
invocation as well.


> possibly only configure IP address by menu choice ?
> 
> -          Custom Boot splash or no boot splash.

The one thats really tough, which was one of my better achievements
with mandrake-8.1, is total bootsplash, I.e. never seeing a text
character at all.  And never seeing a useless desktop.  I.e. hide the
desktop with a full screen 'loading' until the system aquiesces and the
user can dive right in.

> 
>  
> 
> There are many minimalistic distro's like DSL or comprehensive ones
> like
> Knoppix.
> 
> Under standard liveCD tools it seems impossible to create a replica
> distro like either of these without creating a heavily bloated DVD
> image.

Yeah, livecd tools have _a lot_ of room for improvement.  I can't
believe that there still isn't(?) a simple command line script to
generate knoppix purely from up to date debian installation sources.

> 
>  
> 
> Does Fedora have the capability of reproducing such distro's for its
> supported architecture list.

I think pungi (gotta love redhat's project naming skills...  not) is
what you want to look at.

> 
>  
> 
> My reason is to use a specific application in both X & Cmdline, and
> useable in our labs on all platforms, on the smallest media possible.
> 
> Currently I believe from the discussions I am seeing that its barely
> possible for fedora to even complete any kind of liveCD, although
> Jdogs
> pilgrim seems to be the closest in theory ? is pilgrim available and
> useable ? or have I got the wrong idea about pilgrim? (I haven't seen
> a
> website for pilgrim).
> 

Pilgrim is DavidZ's project.  All I've posted so far are 6 year old
mandrake isos that have critical bugs that need to be, and wont be
fixed, and one unionfs+squashfs proof of concept iso and initialization
for fc5, which was nothing but proof of concept of that mechanism (for
fc5).

If you search the archives of this list, you should be able to track
down the pilgrim release url and instructions.

>  
> 
> If anyone has any positive info on how fedora could be used to match
> my
> requests, I would be very interested to test and use on all
> platforms.

I'm working on a lot of the features you described above, but don't
count on me.  (but I'll try here in a couple weeks when my heavy
academic workload turns into a light workload).

-dmc/jdog


> 
>  
> 
> Thanks All
> 
> Andy T
> 
> > --
> Fedora-livecd-list mailing list
> Fedora-livecd-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-livecd-list
> 



 
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