UNDP/IOSN LiveCD rc1/Serena
So, it was the girl’s birthday. Yum cha breakfast, 21 roses, iPod mini, almost-life-size Eeyore and just a long day of fun. Been a busy weekend, so I’m glad its mostly over and its time to get back to the real world. Let’s hope my 21-st isn’t going to be as hectic.
UNDP/IOSN LiveCD
Spent some time customising a LiveCD based on Ubuntu. This is for the UNDP/IOSN project. Some good customisation guides include: LiveCDCustomizationHowTo on the Ubuntu wiki page, and the GnomeLiveCD howto. Sure the LiveCD could ask less questions during setup (a more Knoppix styled “just works” thing). And no matter how much I wanted to use Fedora, I’d have to do some more infrastructure work that won’t make deadlines.
So what did I do differently? I installed flashplugin-nonfree, brought in the ruby dependency, and popped a lot of content into /srv/content (>98MB). Customised Firefox - /etc/mozilla-firefox/pref/firefox.js with pref(”browser.startup.homepage”, “file:///srv/content/html/index.html”); What still needs to be done?
- Add UNDP/IOSN logos appropriately
- Probably beef up the way the index page looks like
- Priority 1 - Update the content to Ubuntu/Hoary style where appropriate (just the end-user-guide basically)
- Fill in the holes that still exist in content (or types); add more primers possibly
- More extensive testing with hardware out there - its not been tested as much as I’d like it
- Release early, release often. And resync with a newer upstream Hoary
- Fix bug where Firefox still doesn’t notice that its supposed to load the index page. So now start Firefox and type: /srv/content/html/index.html in the Location toolbar
- Test Flash. All of you, test the Flash stuff thoroughly. Seems to work for me, but its in beta at the website itself anyways, so go give it a go (try it online - requires Flash 7)
Yes, casper is actually a very nice system to use. It was completely well thought out, I’m glad jdub told me to hang in there back when Warty was released, saying the LiveCD stuff was in the works.
Fedora LiveCD
So, is Stateless Linux without a state at the moment? With Xen around, and possibly soon installer (anaconda) support alongside Xen, the only thing left from stateless seems to be the LiveCD. While developers themselves don’t find LiveCD’s incredibly useful, its a great marketing tool, to say the least. There’s Basilisk, with an installer almost along the way, and then there’s Rookery. The Rookery looks pretty interesting and possibly only requires some namespace merging before it starts churning out LiveCDs. Both are written in shell, so merging/integrating them would make for a better integrated system overall.
Fedora’s success
Fedora takes off as Red Hat declines is headline news today. Generally circling around web server usage, is probably unfair, as RH do have quite the number of paying customers for RHEL. Its nice to see Fedora gain ground, at such a timely occassion that FC4 test1 is out today as well.
Update: Since it didn’t make it online at the UNDP website, its http://www.arenatechniques.com/undp/iosn-hoary-live-i386.iso there now. Be gentle to the server, thanks.