Re: Pre-Alpha patch for a LiveCD with GUI... What next?

[Robert Luciani <rluciani@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sascha Wildner wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> this is probably as good a moment as any to come out of the forest with
> this. The patch at
> 
> http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~swildner/nrelease_gui.diff
> 
> adds some code to nrelease/ to build a LiveCD with xorg and so on
> (currently, only the xorg metapackages and fluxbox are added). In order
> to build one, you need a local dir with the pkgsrc binary packages (see
> below).
> 
> The following commands should then do the trick:
> 
> cd /usr/src
> make buildworld
> make buildkernel
> cd nrelease
> patch -p 0 </path/to/the/patch
> make PKGSRC_PKG_PATH=/path/to/packages/dir/All realquick gui
> 
> The resulting ISO will be in /usr/release/dfly-gui.iso then. It will not
> boot into xorg automatically (although this is easily possible), so you
> need to login as root and do startx.
> 
> As of now, this all is kind of basic, more a proof of concept than
> anything else. As our release framework installs packages via chroot,
> the current setup just copies _all_ packages to the chroot before
> installing (kind of a hack).
> 
> That said, I'm now primarily interested in opinions/ideas/... about the
> direction this should take. Which packages would we like to see on the
> CD? Should it be a generic setup with the "most common things"
> installed, so a system can be quickly setup by the installer (which will
> cpdup /usr/pkg). Or should it be a more specialized set of tools? Or
> even as many packages as possible (Live DVD?). Etc., etc.
> 
> Before continuing on it, I'm really interested in people's input so
> don't hold anything back, please. :)
> 
> Sascha
> 

I think the main point of such a live-cd would be to test
dragonfly-specific features such as vkernels and more. Mplayer and
OpenOffic work the same on all platforms, so they might not be super
important, while irssi, firefox, networking tools, vim, a few more
shells/terminals might make it easier to for people to quickly gauge if
they can reproduce their current productivity and also what is new.

And if the point of a livecd is to test that kind of stuff, then it
would be nice for it to have a kernel that supports as much as possible
like ALTQ, and drivers.

Also if it has lots and lots of programs (thinking multimedia, java,
etc..) it might be hard to keep the future x64 and x86 live-cds on par.
Gentoo had this problem many years ago and it was very bothersome.

-- 
Robert Luciani
Chalmers University of Technology, SWE
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
http://www.rluciani.com/public.key