Newsletter Volume 1 Livecd

Luca Casagrande

luca.casagrande@gmail.com

http://ominiverdi.org

Introducition

What is a Livecd

As wikipedia report, livecd is a "is a generic term for an operating system distribution that is executed upon boot, without installation on a hard drive. Typically, it is stored on bootable media such as a CD-ROM (Live CD), DVD (Live DVD), USB flash drive (Live USB), among others". using this kind of application user can get a "taste" of a full linux box without fighting with any setup. Once the machine with the livecd inside it has been booted, the os is loaded in the RAM and nothing is writen on the hard disk. Of course, just because all operation are made using ram inside of hard disk, all information are lost once the machine has been shut down.

Task

There are many aplication that can be stisfied by a livecd:

1. Using your favourite application anyone you can found a pc
2. Teaching purpose: people can have machine with the needed software in a boot time

Limitation of a Livecd

I always talked about "machine" as the way for botting the livecd. Nothing has been said about the configuration. Once the cd has been bootted, it loads tool that detect the used hardware and configure everything to run smooth. This is easier to say (or write ) then to be done. There are a lot of differents kind of hardware and sometimes the configuration process can go wrong. This can sound as a big problem, but people should remember that every hardware come with its driver packages. In a livecd, all come inside a cd..Os,Driver and Application :) The other thing that should be remembered is that every works that is been done inside a livecd, is lost as soon as the machine its shout down.To avoid this you could use a usb sotrage device to save all your works.

Livecd and open source geospatial software

The

Descrizione tecnica

For building the livecd, we decided to use Catalyst, tool used by Gentoo release team. this tool allow the creation of "high customization livecd" both about architecture and about softwares. Catalyst uses a text file that contains infomration about how creating the livecd: -Architecture to use -Softare to add Each application can be built with a custom configuration, adding or removing item from default configuration infomration:

[..]
sci-libs/gdal -png gif
[..]

This mean that gdal will be built using default configuration without and gif support, but not with

Once the application list is read the softwares are installed using the configuration information described inside a file called packages.use