Re: [seul-edu] Re: Unified Front... blame server, meta-distro

[Douglas Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

Leon Brooks wrote:

> On Saturday 27 April 2002 00:10, Doug Loss wrote:
> 
>>Unless we have lots of space left, I'd say leave off OO, at least until
>>you're sure you've included everything else first.  I'd hate to see one
>>large app take 25-30% of the available space and crowd out numerous
>>smaller, deserving apps.
> 
> OTOH, if office applications answer 70% of a school's requirements, it would 
> be criminal to leave it out.
> 

Yes, but you can get OO easily other places.  We could provide a link 
to it if there's not enough space for it and all the other educational 
apps on one ISO image, but I think we need to make deserving, more 
obscure apps easily available first.


> IMHO, there should also be a CD consisting entirely of Windows stuff which 
> also runs on Linux unchanged. This will better enable mixed environments in 
> which some workstations are unable to be completely exorcised.
> 

Not a bad idea, but the subject for a separate project, I think. 
Let's not expand the scope of this so far that we never accomplish it.


> Mandrake has published scripts for assembling an entire distro from scratch. 
> It is a fairly straightforward matter to lop out a bunch of stuff you won't 
> be using on a student workstation, graft in a passel of educational apps, 
> sort out the dependencies and then hammer the life out of your hard drive and 
> end up with a complete CD or few ready to install. I'd be surprised if RedHat 
> and SuSE didn't have near equivalents. Debian's concept of `a distribution' 
> is not as black-and-white, so it should be even easier to deal with.
> 
> At the end of the day, one will have to sort out a few distribution-specific 
> dependency trees to get the basic stuff in place, and after that it should be 
> a matter of typing a single command (heck, bury it in an icon if you like) to 
> produce all of the CDs for all of the distributions and variants (and/or 
> standalone distributions) that your heart desires. In a school, of course, 
> you can distribute the workload (ie, assign one compile load to a machine and 
> build the whole lot in parallel; and/or in a lab full of such machines, burn 
> in parallel).
> 

This all sounds great.  But let's not try to run before we walk. 
Right now, we need to evaluate the apps we've found for suitability in 
an ISO image.  After that's done, we need to get the basic productions 
stuff down.  The auto-generation of tailored images for specific 
distros would come after that.


> We should be able to offer either a support CD for most major distributions, 
> or a CD (set) for at least a few of the major ones which is complete (ie, 
> cram it into a bare machine and wind up with an education-centred workstation 
> or server).

The first idea is what I'm shooting for.  There are enough people 
making distros, and some are even doing just what you've mentioned 
about education-centered workstations and servers.  If we created yet 
another one, it would likely be lost in the noise.  But a support CD 
that could be used with most distros would be much more useful, and 
more likely to be noticed.

--
Doug Loss          As long as I have you there is just
drloss@suscom.net  one other thing I'll always need--
(570) 326-3987     tremendous self control.
                           Ashleigh Brilliant