[K12OSN] Fw: K12LTSP chroot Install Notes

[Jim Kronebusch]

FYI - This was posted on the Fedora-education list yesterday afternoon. 
Currently there has been no response to it.  If anyone on this list would care
to respond it may be a good idea.  Sounds like this could be a good thing, I
would hate to see it die because it was posted to a list that does not have
much of a subscriber base.

---------- Forwarded Message -----------
From: Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com>
To: Fedora Education Initiative <fedora-education-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Wed, 09 Aug 2006 17:08:56 -0400
Subject: K12LTSP chroot Install Notes

Today we had a short conference call with Eric Harrison, Jim McQuillan, 
Scott Balneaves, Bill Nottingham and Greg DeKoenigsburg talking about 
what it will take to integrate LTSP to be an official part of Fedora.

After we have the modifications to a Fedora chroot ready for booting 
K12LTSP thin clients, we will need to make wrap it into a convenient 
installer.

I just talked with Jeremy Katz, head of our Anaconda installer team.

He confirmed that it would be unacceptable for chroots to be built 
during initial install of the host system itself.  It is best to do such 
activity in the actual running system where things can be more easily 
developed and debugged.  He suggested that Anaconda in chroot mode is 
the best way to do this.  It could be wrapped into either a firstboot 
module or a tool to run from the menu.

K12LTSP chroot Installs
=======================
1) On any Fedora install, you can use yum groupinstall to pull in the 
K12LTSP infrastructure. *OR* Install from the K12LTSP distro cut which 
has the base system plus K12LTSP by default.

The package that contains K12LTSP thin client image builder has both a 
GTK+ app, and module in /usr/share/firstboot/modules which runs anaconda 
with the desired options.

2) During firstboot it runs as one of the later steps.  Optionally you 
can run it from the menu.

3) K12LTSP Thin Client image builder can install the chroot from any RPM 
packages.  This means it could prompt for the K12LTSP or specific CD's 
containing what it needs, or network.

4) Post-install it flips whatever bits to make it into read-only init mode.

Anaconda chroot mode
====================
hg clone http://hg.fedoraproject.org/hg/fedora/livecd--devel

Fedora's LiveCD builder uses anaconda in chroot mode to build the image 
before it is made into an ISO.  This is a good example to use for the 
K12LTSP thin client image builder.

How to apply updates to chroot?
===============================
We would need some kind of obvious (automatic?) thin client chroot 
updater.  It would use existing tools, yum based.

We need to balance automation for ease while avoiding breakage of user 
systems.  How is this currently handled in Edubuntu?

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com

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Jim Kronebusch
Cotter Tech Department
507-453-5188


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