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 or installation. Once the liveCd has been booted, everything it's loaded in the RAM keeping safe the hard disk. Of course, as soon as the machine it's shuted down, every change it's lost.

Tasks

There are many application that can be satisfied by a livecd:

1. Using your favorite application everywhere you can find a pc
2. Teaching purpose: people can have machine with the needed software in a boot time
3. Using old machine: livecd can be run on smooth machine and also without HD.
4. Showing project: it's a very cool way of spread your work aroun. You deliver your work ( for example data ) and all application needed to appreciate it !

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 booted, it loads tool that detect the hardware and configure everything to run smoothly. This is easier to say (or write ) then to be done. There are a lot of different kind of hardwares 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 :) (are you sure you want to use emoticons on the Newletter?) The other thing that should be remembered is that every works that has been done inside a liveCd is lost as soon as the machine has been shut down. To avoid this you can use a usb storage device to save all your works.

Livecd and open source geospatial software

The

Technical Description

For building the livecd, we decided to use Catalyst, the tool used by Gentoo Release Team. this choices come from 2 points:

1. Catalyst allow full customization
2. Upgrading the softwares

This tool allows the creation of "highly customized liveCd" about architecture and softwares. Catalyst uses a text file that contains information about how creating the liveCd:

• Architecture to use
• Software to add

Each application can be built with a custom configuration, adding or removing item from the default configuration:

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

This mean that gdal will be built using default configuration with gif support, but not with

png support.

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

Future Development and task

Our goal is to keep the cd updated, creating new version at regular times, or at least as soon as major update or included softwares will come out.

Right now we are working on two tasks:

1. An Installer for the livecd
2. A server edition with mapserver and some webgis application

LiveCD installer

The installer will be accessible trough an icon on the desktop. The installation process will guide the user to the set up of the linux distribution in his computer. Installing on the hard disk will allow better performances and the possibility to update all packages thanks to Gentoo systems.

Server Edition

The server edition will target a server machine with minimum graphical support but full featured set of application to offer OCG Web Services and UMN Mapserver front ends (ka-Map, Open Layers, p.Mapper, ecc.).

More Infos

• Ominiverdi Livecd Project
• Gentoo Catalyst Project