Re: [tlug] the power of the live CD

["Edmund Edgar" <lists@example.com>]

Hi Scott.

Distributing a CD including Java, Flash, the various
codecs and all that stuff would be a bit naughty - theoretically you'd
have to license them all from their various copyright holders - which
is why it's hard to find a pre-existing CD with all this stuff
included. I suspect this is one of the reasons why live-cd's, despite
being very cool and having a lot of potential, haven't really taken off
except among Linux otaku's like ourselves. (Other reasons being the
difficulty in getting networking running for home users and trouble
setting the bios to boot from the CD instead of the hard disk - which
less and less consumer level pc's seem to do by default any more.)

Technically it should be fairly straightforward; If you're
remastering something like Knoppix, which starts out packed to the full
700 MB, you may need to remove quite a lot of stuff; If you're not very
careful, you'll increase the amount of space you use in the remastering
process. For example, if you use apt-get to update or install a few
things, you end up with quite a bit of stuff in /var/cache/apt/archives
which you need to delete when you're done. 

If you're having problems getting it down to 700MB, I would have
thought it was something other than the compression process that was
failing; If
you're following the instructions in the howto, it will either compress
properly or not at all (I guess). If you're going a little bit over, it
might be worth your while keeping a copy of the original source you're
remastering from, and running something like 
diff -r --brief original_copy/ remastered_copy/ > potentially_very_long_file_to

_wade_through
to see if anything's grown that you didn't expect.

Putting all the Japanese fonts and things in also takes quite a bit of space and is quite fiddly to do well, so instead of starting with a full-monty everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Knoppix or Kubuntu install, you might be better off starting with something little like Damn Small Linux, then putting in the packages that you want. There's a ready-Japanized version here:
http://2.csx.jp/livecdroom/#damnsmall

Starting with something small also takes less disk space and makes the development cycle a lot quicker, so I'd recommend it, at least until you get used to the remastering process.

Also, KDE and Gnome are a bit heavy for people running with limited RAM, so you probably want something lighter; If you're trying to keep things simple while making Windows users feel at home, I'd recommend IceWM.

Hope that helps. I've spent a fair bit of time playing with this stuff, and I'll be happy to try to help out if you get stuck - feel free to e-mail me on- or off-list as appropriate.

Have fun,

Edmund Edgar