[Fedora-livecd-list] one-livecd-per-child?

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 14:02 -0500, Andy Gospodarek wrote:
> I've had similar thoughts centered around making a bootable CD that has
> all the tools necessary to start doing C/C++ development.  The students
> could have usb keys for their active projects so the PC's don't need any
> storage and they also don't need to be maintained by anyone.  

Right, this is entirely possible to do with livecd-tools; just, as
Thomas says, fedora-livecd-development would be a good name and it would
most likely just be like fedora-livecd-desktop; e.g. build upon
fedora-livecd-gnome. Literally, it wouldn't take very long to do this.

Perhaps it would include things like Eclipse, perhaps that's another
live cd. It should probably be the same though; we don't really want a
tons of different officila live cd builds with hugely overlapping
feature sets.

If the computers to be used by the students got 1GB of RAM or more, it
would even be faster, or at least as fast, as using a native install.

We would need the "keep state on USB stick" feature but that is not a
lot of work. The most work with this feature are writing UI tools so the
user can designate all or part of a USB stick to be used for
persistence. Probably some small python app is the right answer.

I'm toying around with ideas of having the computers network boot from a
server (PXEBOOT) and download the .iso into RAM and run from there just
as on "run from RAM" livecd runs. Then everything would be centrally
managed. It shouldn't be a lot of work and my colleagues here at Red Hat
in the QA dept are screaming for features like that to test out new
builds. That would make lot of sense in a computer lab too. It's almost
like Stateless Linux.

      David