On Sat, 14 Oct 2006, Benjamin Judas wrote:
Hello folks,
I took the decision to reanimate "Project Dolphin". Dolphin was an
experimental minimal CD similar to Grmbl aimed at semi-professionals and
professionals to help repair broken systems or minimize data-loss.
Opposites to the official Gentoo-Minimal-CDs it contained more software and
also a working gcc (the idea behind that was to provide a quickly available
distcc-host by simply bootng any additional machines in a network with the
dolphin CD).
Hmm.. what about a minimal-media like system which could exploit unionfs
and provide similar functionality to DSL (Damn Small Linux)?
I came to enjoy the DSL extensibility, yet, as a gentoo user/veteran feel
that their packaging system is done, well, not right.
If a minimal system provided tools usually expected from Gentoo
installation (portage/sandbox), it might be able to merge binary packages
outside the core configuration into tmpfs, as well as be able
to build new packages to tailor everyone's specific needs.
It is well within the spirit of Gentoo, as it will offer the users the
ultimate flexibility, and it can be implemented by freezing the portage
tree for the release which was used to build the core packages.
imagine users just putting binary packages onto "mygentoo/" directory on
liveCD/liveUSB, as well as being able to build new packages, limited only
in the amount of RAM availiable, as the binaries would be unpacked there.
And, equally easily, a user could take the running system and repack new
readonly squashfs store from large packages they wish to keep on their
media
Such specialized livemedia could be useful for advanced users trying to
setup gentoo-based multimedia kiosks, demonstrations etc.
Tomasz Mloduchowski,
MIT Media Lab: Tangible Media Group
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