[Fedora-livecd-list] pilgrim livecd work

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 12:23 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 10:41 -0500, Jasper Hartline wrote:
> > David Zeuthen wrote:
> > 
> > >(adding back fedora-desktop-list as that Cc: field mysteriously
> > >vanished.)
> 
> Doing this again. Please don't munge the To: or Cc: headers. Thanks.
> 
You may need to hit reply-to-all instead of reply (mailman for this list
is setting "reply-to:" which can cause this issue)

> > >So, you know, I'd hate to replace < 100 lines of code by depending on
> > >anaconda, which, I might add, is designed to do far more than the
> > >relatively straightforward task of doing live cd's. I'm not even sure it
> > >makes sense to carry around code in anaconda to facilitate live cd
> > >installs but I'll leave that judgement call to the Anaconda developers.
> > >  
> > >
> > Ok. Good luck partitioning a disk in any sort of way with Yum.
> 
> Well, I take it that you are aware that cd media is not normally
> partitioned (it is for bizarre things like Apple Mac OS X install CD's
> using Apple Partition Map; but that is totally not relevant for a Fedora
> Live CD on any architecture we want to support). 
> 
I was confused when I first read autopsy's comment as well.  Autopsy,
are you talking about partitioning when creating the liveCD/liveX image?
Or talking about paritioning when installing from liveMedia to a hard
drive?

[snip]

> The lack of motivation has to do with the fact that I'm not sure how
> useful it is since ext3 basically is pretty wasteful and have no
> compression [1]. To have any kind of useful system you'd need a 2GB or
> bigger stick. Second, I think once we get the "install to hard disk"
> feature done people can just install the OS to a USB stick / hard disk
> from the livecd and be done with it. That will also ensure that we fix
> up the UUID of the file system and other stuff.
> 
I think we want a liveUSB system that mirrors the liveCD ideas.
Comparing liveUSB to Install to hard drive is problematic for exactly
the issue you identify here: a standard ext3 image takes up lots of
space.  Both USB and CDRom are space constrained media.  Having the
ability to create <256MB images is the use case I have for the livecd
creating system (which will fit on cheaply available USB drives, compact
flash, and disk-on-module's.)

Installing a full Fedora OS on USB 2GB+ is a separate issue that
naturally falls out of liveMedia => hard drive installs as you say
below.

> We can easily add variants for "usb stick" builds until we have the
> "install to hard disk" feature. But I'd rather that we worked on the
> latter, that feature is so much more important for Fedora as gdk so
> eloquently points out.
> 
install to hard disk has no use to me so I'm afraid I know nothing about
what autopsy has been working on and how it compares to pilgrim.

> We could also add a new hack to use squashfs / ext3 / dm-snapshot hacks
> to the live USB image where the overlay lives in a file on a different
> partition of the USB stick. That way we'd have a semi-useful system that
> would fit on a 512MB stick.

This could be an interesting next step.

I like pilgrim's simplicity.  I'm a little hesitant that it's written in
shell (Shell doesn't scale to larger projects nearly as well as python.
Although the original kadischi code had a lot of
reimplementation-of-the-wheel problems.)  Kadischi's dependence on
anaconda is a mixed bag -- when it works, it's nice to have a way to
select packages that even the non-technical people at my work can figure
out but when it doesn't work we're often waiting for patches to make it
into anaconda or cannot build on FC-stable, we have to update the
cd-building machine to rawhide to run the development anaconda.  I don't
know if pilgrim will have similar upstream issues (since it's first
priority is OLPC) or not (because davidz is here talking to us
enthusiastically about what he's done so far :-). pilgrim's inheritance
system for package lists looks nice.  Kadischi's ability to use
kickstart files is nice.

I'll have to run pilgrim to see how kadischi and pilgrim differ in real
usage.

-Toshio
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