Difference between revisions of "Newsletter Volume 1 Livecd"
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=Future Development and task= | =Future Development and task= | ||
Revision as of 16:03, 28 March 2007
- 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:
- Using your favorite application everywhere you can find a pc
- Teaching purpose: people can have machine with the needed software in a boot time
- Using old machine: livecd can be run on smooth machine and also without HD.
- 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
When building a livecd, it contains both the kernel, the drivers, the WM and all the applications. Of course is pretty impossible to put all the driver that are used for all the machine, so can happen that, during the boot the cd stops or something else goes wrong (missine lan detection for example). During the years, have been created very good tool that detect the hardware during the boot, but, like every software application, there can be still bug. So you must see a failing boot, as a crash..that will be fixed soon.
The other thing that should be clear, it's that no information it's saved while working in the livecd enveiroment. This is good from a side ( for example for keeping safe your data) but can be thedius for another way. The solution for this is use a Storage Device (like an USB HD for example) to store all your output.This approach could also be used to save configuration file, so that you can have the same setting at every boot.
Livecd and open source geospatial software
For those approaching the world of
Ominiverdi Livecd
Objective
Our livecd will try to offer to user always this thing:
- Keep all software up to date with every single official release
- Include Guide, Documents and Tutorial
- Grant a good hardware compatibilty
Tecnical development
We decided to use the same tool that Gentoo Release Engineering use: Catalyst.
This choice as been made for 2 main reason:
- Use a system that will keep the updating fast and safe
- Allow the customization of everything inside the cd
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:
- An Installer for the livecd
- 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.).