Hi All,
Perhaps OSG users are already doing this,
or are considering.
The purpose of this email is to throw this possibility out there, and
to get feedback from OSG users who might find such an means of
distribution useful. There are members of the community far better
placed to actual go ahead and implement such a system too so I'd be
nice to hear from guys with more knowledge on the OS side. There are
already tools for creating Live CD's, I haven't played with them yet,
but perhaps in a few years I'll have time to...
After watching this interesting thread I just want to add some ideas:
Jan wrote:
I had a decent experience with remastering Knoppix:
http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Knoppix_Remastering_Howto
However, there you have to hack the boot scripts to install the
proprietary driver correctly - Knoppix doesn't ship them.
classic Live-CD remastering sounds for me like a time consuming and
unflexible approach, but it could work.
Today, a lot of improvements exists to build such systems automated in
minutes. The Debian "live-helper" Package contains the tools you will
need to let your machine build a "Application System" for the target
machine , containing the latest Packages, Security Fixes etc. from a
repository.
A good starting point: http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/
After installing the "live-helper" package you can start to build a
live-image from a config file.
This is something I've been think about too - just giving training classes a
USB disk with the OS, dev tools, data, the OSG and the rest of the training
materials required for the course. My theory is that it'd avoid the need to
help users jump through all the platform specific hurdles required to get the
OSG built and running... It would of course introduce other issues...
If you need to boot multiple machines for your "classroom application" :
Instead of booting machines via CDROM, USB-Stick etc. it is faster to
boot the clients in your classroom via PXE NetBoot from a
terminalserver application on a server machine. The terminalserver is
automatically configuring the clients in the network and feeds them
with the application. Different machines can boot the same ISO with
machine specific boot options so there are a lot of possibillities.
Under my testings, such a system was up and running after 2-3 minutes.
Booting directly into the application can be done, so that osgViewer
worked fullscreen after pressing the power button.
btw. there was 4 different machines in my "classroom", and it also
worked fine even if the clients PC Hardware in use was different
About the Major Distri's:
I have tested a lot of them but I really don't know about existing
Major Linux Distrubution which supports all needed steps for the
creation of such a OSG-Application System out of the box, but the
interested user can find a lot of some really useful implementation in
smaller Linux distris.
The preview versions, of the KANOTIX distri have already done what we
talk about .
It is a general linux distribution with support for 64 bit systems, not
specialised on graphics only, but it contains all that interesting
helpers for our needs.
You can just test how such concrete ISO works if you like . It
contains the OS, KDE, OSG, Zero Ballistics Game Beta-Test and working
graphics hardware detection, 3D driver download. It installs the 3D
driver on the fly .
http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/preview/kanotix-ng-zb.iso
http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/preview/kanotix-ng-zb.iso.md5
After booting the cd you can start the game from the menu.
It shows how it works , if you need help just visit irc channel #kanotix
Today, this distribution contains the latest OSG Release Packages and
some osg-apps on their own repository and will be a good base to build
this special type of applications.
regards, Markus
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