Re: [gugmasters] Marketing & promotion - Cheat sheets, LiveCDs, community calendar

[Erik Snoeijs <stratos stratos-online nl>]

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 11:27 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Dave Neary wrote:
> >>     * LiveCD:  I think that's a great idea.  I've been reading through
> >>       the documentation for customizing an Ubuntu LiveCD at
> >>       https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomization/6%2e06 --
> >>       I'm going to need some help on this one.
> > 
> > http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLiveCd is a HOWTO on what Luis and others did
> > to make the GNOME 2.12 LiveCD.
> 
> One other point - Ubuntu is not the only choice of distribution for
> this. Foresight Linux (by Ken VanDine of GNOME, and others) always has
> bleeding edge GNOME including un-official but useful GNOME apps, and
> might be a realistic alternative. Ken can tell us whether he has a
> LiveCD now, and where we can get Xen/QEMU/VMWare images (I see themnoted
> on the LiveCD wiki page).
> 
> Cheers,
> Dave.
> 

Now i don't know Foresigh Linux so perhaps i'm wrong about this, but i
think it would be a better choice to use a distro that has puts lots of
work in supporting lots of mainstream hardware (like fedora or ubuntu or
suse for all i care).

One of the biggest target groups that will be using the liveCD's will be
mainly people new to linux, so besides having to convince them that
gnome is the next ipod, we also have to convince them that linux will
also just work. (just like there pre-installed win XP, installation)

If they put in there liveCD and it hangs, it's gnome that sucks.
Gnome won't suspend, gnome doesn't do wireless, gnome is a terminal with
a blinking light and the text 'X encountered a problem'

Now gnome-nl used to also try and produce a live-cd, however the guy who
did it wasn't motivated enough to carry on and since the gnome live-cd
also started doing translations, there wasn't really a pressing need at
the time.

What i can remember from the time though is that the process of actually
creating a live-cd was pretty dodgy. The biggest problem for us at the
time was making gconf changes and such. The work around we used at the
time was to boot the system before creating a iso in a chrooted env. I'm
not sure why because i was only half involved with the nitty gritty of
it, but it turned out to break more then fix using that method.
It's also a pretty time consuming business compiling the iso, which made
it pretty hard to do trial&error fixing of stuff.