[Fedora-livecd-list] Fedora "builder" CD

[neville]

Tom Lisjac wrote:

>On 6/13/05, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Chip Turner wrote:
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
>>True enough.  One of my goals, though, is to have something that the
>>Fedora Marketing project can burn and ship all over the world -- a
>>complete "this is Fedora, baby, one DVD, put it in and watch 'er rip."
>>    
>>
>
>This would involve a tedious but straightforward mastering process
>that could probably be done in a few days by an individual using
>existing tools. Unfortunately I don't see the utility of the DVD
>format when so many systems aren't equipped with them.  Compression
>can pack a standard CD with most of the killer apps that Linux has to
>offer... and if the plan is to ship these around the world, they're
>going to encounter a lot of older hardware that won't know what a DVD
>is.
>
>  
>
>>>What would be cooler is if you could create them on the fly from a
>>>given package set; basically take a kickstart... but, if someone
>>>downloads the original DVDs or
>>>CDs, they should be able to just make their own.
>>>      
>>>
>
>This is the project I'm interested in working on. A graphical tool to
>do this doesn't exist yet.
>
>  
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>>The question now is, "how do we get our hands dirty"?
>>    
>>
>
>Focusing on a specific goal would be a good start.
>
>Media size and type are just parameters. A challenge worthy of this
>list would be creating a tool that makes package selection,
>customization and image building easy. For me, the basic requirement
>is gui based system that will create a variety of selectable OS image
>types from a pile of binary RPMs.  In this context, business card
>CD's, UML images, DVD's, USB stick bootables, hd installs, etc are
>just radio buttons on a tabbed panel. Roger Binn's UMLBuilder with
>individual package and media type selection is pretty close:
>
>http://umlbuilder.sourceforge.net/
>
>So at this point, we have two different projects on the table. One is
>to build a FedoraMax DVD... the other is to build a "builder". Picking
>the one that the people on this list are interested in would probably
>be the best way to get started.
>
>-Tom
>
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>  
>
Hi,

Here is what I am going to do with the next version of ADIOS live CD so 
why not Fedora "builder" CD.  I am including squashfs and unionfs as 
part of the kernel. 

So my suggestion is that standard Fedora kernel have these modules or 
similar, then it is easy to create a "builder" CD on the fly, just 
create a "root_fs" filesystem on a spare partition or directly into a 
2GByte loopback filesystem.  This root_fs filesystem is then placed 
within a squashfs filesystem.  This only requires the startup process 
using say isolinux+busybox+vmlinuz+initrd.gz (or whatever) to mount the 
squashfs, create a ram drive for read-write, then mount the loopback 
using unionfs, a few extra "if" statements in rc.sysinit (or rc.bootcd) 
and then the live CD works.

-- 

regards Neville
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email: n.richter at qut.edu.au  room: S745 Gardens Point
phone: +61 7 3864 1928   fax: +61 7 3221 2384
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Neville Richter, Senior Lecturer
School of Software Engineering & Data Communications
Faculty of Information Technology
Queensland University of Technology
Box 2434 Brisbane 4001 AUSTRALIA