On Friday 30 March 2007 07:00, David A. Frantz wrote: > Games can come or go but if the time comes that one needs to trim the > space on the CD I would hope that the office programs stayed around for > a bit. There are numerous uses for "office" apps in the modern shop.
One of the problems with using a demo CD aimed at the mass market as a basis for "niche market" distro is that you get lumbered with the bells'n'whistles. Games and audio-visual applications cost space, throw in a large office suite, and the essential tools have to be dropped. Install from a live CD, and you get what ever is running without any chance of fine tuning the package selection - Sure, you could go through weeding out and removing stuff after installation, but it can be a tiresome exercise. For an "experimental" package such as emc2, essential tools to include are compilers, *-dev packages, and other sundry tools to build from source. Having a spreadsheet, text editor (even better if it can do highlighting for G code), and a calculator are advantageous. A selection of CAD tools should be regarded as desirable or even essential. For building a live CD to act as a demonstration vehicle, there are a number of tools that can be used - Feed in a list of desired packages, point to a suitable repository, and as long as there are no broken dependencies, output an ISO image. [Have a couple of boxes online that generate Live images every night thanks to a cron job.] If the primary purpose of the CD is to act as an installation medium, then being able to have some degree of control over what is installed is desirable. This would allow a user to choose a minimal install of say under 100Megs, or go for "everything" (perhaps a Gig or two). This method requires a little more work from the CD builder to ensure all dependencies are satisfied on the CD, and if any custom packages are required, they are not broken just to work round a problem. Again, there are tools available to build installation type CDs that require nothing more than a package list as an input. [Takes about ten minutes to update a BDI-4 package list, and a coffee or two to build - Could be automated without any real effort.] Once either system (or even both) is set up, a new CD could be generated on demand or with the aid of a cron job - Most of the time involved after the initial setting up is minor edits to meet the requests of users.. Should anyone have a suggestion for package inclusion for the BDI-4, you only need to ask - There is some 30Megs currently unused, and there is always the possibility of using a second CD.. Would draw a line at a complete Debian archive as that would use over fourteen disks. --- Paul. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
