Hi all, after reading the (quite large) thread happened middle of this year about reactivating the LiveCD project, I would like to add some comments and thoughts about it.
* For what do I use such a CD Mainly I used such a CD for rescue purposes but nowadays, missconfiguration occur quite seldom (thanks the lord) so this kind of usage tents to go to background. Nowadays, in the virtualization aera, I'm going to use such a CD to have the initial boot of a VM (on VirtualBox) possible. Thats quite the same as having a phys. PC with no OS and want to have a LFS on it. * What should be included Must: A fairly uptodate OS with all the tools available to bootstrap a LFS while being offline. So the sources (including a well selected collection of required/usefull packages from BLFS) should be on it. May: Option to go online and start pulling the uptodate version of the book and sources. Having the (really famous!) jhalfs installed makes stuff quite easy. * What is not needed While it is nice to have, a graphical environment is not needed, i think. It consumes a quite large amount of CD space which should better used for a selection of BLFS source packages. * My proposal An idea I had was to rethink the goal of the LiveCD project at all. All the main books (LFS, BLFS) are about to show how things are going, they have an educational goal. In LFS it is to show how to build a fairly usable OS from scratch. The next step is to expand that by adding things using the BLFS book. It shows how simple packages (like ed for example) are to be installed but also how it is done for quite complex stuff like X11 and later KDE(4). They all shows us <how things are made>. Couldn't that be the idea of the LiveCD project too? Something like a CDFS book (CD from scratch). Taking a well done LFS build and add this, remove all that, tweak there and move things around with the final chapter headlined "Burn that on CD". We have several hints about creating a CD this way, but unfortunatly they all are quite outdated. Later on, the CDFS could be extended, like BLFS extends LFS, by a BCDFS book which shows all the techniques to squeeze more stuff on an ISO, introducing such things like unionfs etc. etc. and have an eye on more sophisticate hardware detection and so on. With very very great respect to Alexander Patrakovs work on the CD, i think it has been gone too far as such a system is at least as complex to maintain as a full blown desktop. Adding the multi-languange support requires many developers around the world who are going to maintain and test that all. Even if I want to, I'm not able to check whether the thai language set is working proper. I think nowadays we all can assume that people doing LFS are capable to read english words and should be able to navigate on a system which "speaks" English. All the stuff added to the CD hides the real (technical) challage: Booting from CD - Thats all what a CD in this context is about. But, following the idea of (B)CDFS, one who is interested to build such a full blown LiveCD, the four books (LFS, BLFS, CDFS, BCDFS) should have given enough howtos and knowledge to do that. I would really like to see that the CD project will awake somehow even we have so much work to do on the BLFS book. Just my 0.02€ Thomas -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/livecd FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
