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

[Andy Gospodarek]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 03:12:47PM -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 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.

Having a bunch of CD's isn't ideal.  If we had one with just a few
compilers/interpreters and one or two small editors/ide's (as long as we
don't forget cscope!) I would be thrilled and it could be useful for
educational/teaching environments.  The challenge maybe be to keep it
small enough to fit on a single CD.

You know what the 'killer app' would be for the any fedora-livecd:
pilgrim.  I realize we don't want to have 30 'official livecds' but it
would be great to have one of them that made it easy for others to make
their own livecd.  I once wanted to build a livecd to help someone clean
their system (since they were sure it was infected with a nasty virus)
and getting setup to build a livecd with the right tools was too
cumbersome based on the amount of time I had.  Being able to download a
livecd and boot it (or run with qemu) to make another would be awesome.
It would allow me to make livecd's on almost any system.  (Sorry if this
has already been discussed on the list, but I haven't been reading it
much lately.)

> 
> 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.

I didn't think of that, but it would be.  I assume that you are using
tmpfs (or something similar) so the pages storing the applications allow
them to execute in place.

> 
> 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.

For the first pass, just being able to mount the usb stick easily and
read write files to it would be fine.  Customization of the running
environment based on the contents of the stick would be great, but we
would probably want to focus on an easy way to have the stick mounted
and accessed.  There might need to be some extra considerations as well
since everything should work with a FAT-formatted stick (so everyone in
the world doesn't have to reformat their sticks to ext/jffs to make them
work on the fedora-livecd).

> 
> 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.
> 

Interesting....