[Fedora-livecd-list] pilgrim livecd work

[Rahul]

Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 11:53 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
>> On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 20:43 +0530, Rahul wrote:
>>> How do you plan on performing upgrades when the live cd gets a install 
>>> to hard disk feature?
>> Well, I've written about that in the README.fedora file. Lemme
>> cut'n'paste so people can rip it apart. It's basically just a braindump,
>> I haven't written code for this just yet (patches welcome!). 
>>
>> So.. my plan basically just involves running 'yum -y update' in the
>> chroot you install to. Not sure we need any UI, some progress feedback
>> would be nice, not sure if yum can do that already. Seth?
>>
>> Specifically this means that once you boot into the installed OS all
>> updates will have been applied. Clearly this requires network
>> connectivity but such is life. I also expect that it's feasible to do
> 
> Right; we certainly can't fit all Fedora Core packages on one LiveCD,
> since a LiveCD is obviously only _one_ CD.  So you'd never be able to
> upgrade off packages from a CD.  Furthermore with Extras its highly
> likely that people have packages from Extras, and that doesn't fit on a
> CD either.
> 
> About the only reasons you might _ever_ want to update from a LiveCD are
> (a) to test your hardware with the new kernel, and to (b) see what new
> apps and features are around, before you actually do the update.  I
> don't see what is all that useful about doing the actual update from
> from the LiveCD itself though, versus rebooting and running a small tool
> to pull down new .repo files and doing the equivalent of 'yum update'
> which other tools already do for us.

This method is not widely documented or easy to use yet AFAIK.

> 
> What's the use-case here for update from a LiveCD anyway?  Why?
> 

Basically. My interest in having a install/upgrade from a Live CD is 
directly related to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/FreeMedia.

Fedora is currently 5 CD's/ One DVD and this is expected to grow once 
when have Fedora Extras on the media too which might be as soon as FC7 
since its kind of a prerequisite for this - 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UnleashKDE. In effect we might see the 
number of CD's double or even more.

A useful desktop set requires the first two CD's in Fedora through the 
Anaconda method and you can only perform a minimalistic installation 
from a single CD. Currently we are distributing DVD's in Free media 
program instead which is a problem in many regions where DVD drivers and 
media is costly and not widely used. Magazines and books prefer to 
distribute distributions which have a single CD more often to reduce 
their costs. There is also a perception of "bloat" related to the number 
of CD's.

In events and for Freemedia distributions it would much more effective 
to hand out a single live CD with a hard disk installation feature. Of 
course people might want more software and they would have to grab it 
off the internet or some other distribution mechanism but a single 
installalable live CD covers the typical use case and promotional needs.

Once this method is propagated and commonly used, users would already 
have installations which they would want to upgrade later. Having this 
functionality in a Live CD would mean that I could just forget about 
Anaconda in Fedora and stick with a Live CD for all my needs which is 
confined to a desktop and grabbing stuff on demand off the network.

Rahul