I'm wondering whether it will be achievable and desirable to use a
GeoFOSS LiveDVD as the only installed operating system at workshops and
labs at FOSS4G 2009.
If we can achieve this, it will have many benefits:
* Labs will be easier to configure and setup
* We would avoid M$ licence costs as the image is based on linux
* After FOSS4G we would have a proven LiveDVD which can be used for
workshops and labs at smaller OSGeo events around the world
The cost to us as a community is that we will need to invest in getting
all our software packaged up into the LiveDVD (which of course will have
many spin off benefits) as per:
http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2008/10/creating-geofoss-distribution-pipeline.html
So my questions to communities are:
Do you and your project think you would commit to packaging your project
into a debian based LiveDVD before FOSS4G in October 2009?
For presenters, would you want to add tutorial material to the LiveDVD,
which would mean using an Open licence like Creative Commons?
Marco Lechner wrote:
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Hi Tyler,
sorry, I can't help you according to Intel-MACs. We only used the
Notebooks provided by our university computing center. So we only had to
deal with three different hardware-types.
Our first idea was to use Live-DVDs and create one broad LiveDVD for all
workshops or an individual LiveDVD-Image for each workshop. This wasn't
practical, because it would have been necessary to burn a big bunchof
DVDs. The other problem we had to deal with was, that one type of
notebooks we used were IBM tablet-PCs - without any DVD-drive.
So it came out that the best solution might be to configure a big Server
to work as an tftp-boot machine and boot all the Workshop-Images via PXE.
It was very impressive how good it worked. We used a custom PXE-boot
prompt where the participants were asked to choose there Workshop and
the chosen individual Workshop-image booted via Net.
One very good side effect was that it was possible to provide the
individual workshop-images days before the conference to the workshop
leaders as iso-Image. So they had the possibility to check if the Image
works exactly as expected. Updating and building a new image took about
half an hour.
Of course you need a good network as requirement. Our Server just had
1GBit-Port available. The Notebooks were connected via 100MBit. It was
o.k. to boot 20 Notebooks parallel - this was enough for our maximum of
two parallel workshops. The boot of all systems took about 5 min (not
the best you can get but o.k.). After the boot the network traffic
wasn't a problem.
Another side-effect was that we were able to have a Internet-Cafe also
using PXE-boot. The visitors could use the "normal" prepared
@-Cafe-Image or boot one of the Workshop-Images to have a closer look
after they participated at a workshop, ...
For future conferences I'd recommend the following equipment:
- - 1 workshop-server, able to spit 10 GBit
- - each workshop room connected with 1GBit (up to ~5 parallel workshops
possible)
- - each notebook connected with 100MBit (up to 20 notebooks/workshop
possible)
Very nice scenario - I'd like to see this working.
Marco
P.S. of course the best side effect was, that we didn't have to install
anything on the notebooks. We wanted to have a M$-free conference. And
our university computing centre told us not to modify the
Windows-Installations on the notebooks :-P
By the way also the session-notebooks were only equipped with
OS-Software (Ubuntu/OpenOffice/...) and the speakers could handle that.
The FOSSGIS 2008 was definitely free as Freibier in Freiburg ;-)
Especially if you keep that participating the conference is for free
(you have to register - about 500 did) only the workshops cost about
80EUR each.
Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) schrieb:
On 9-Oct-08, at 12:04 AM, Marco Lechner wrote:
At the german language conference "FOSSGIS" in April we used
live-images to provide all the workshop-notebooks using PXE-boot with
individual liveimages booting at the beginning of a workshop.
Marco,
Slightly off-topic, but I'm curious if (and how) you provided PXE-boot
for Intel-based Macs, since they don't PXE. Do you know if anyone did
it? I've heard of people using Slax or systemrescuedisk to help get the
net boot process running, but I haven't tried it yet.
Tyler
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Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
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Think Globally, Fix Locally
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