[PlanetCCRMA] LiveCD PlanetCCRMA. Someone working on that?

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 19:23, Luis Garrido wrote:
> I don't like Fedora specially, but the fact that Fernando is actively 
> providing updated kernels and apps makes of the planet the best audio 
> distro.

Thanks. It _is_ a lot of work... always more than what I think will
be...

> More and more I feel the need of a LiveCD to be able to work at different 
> locations. I have been googling around a bit.
> 
> What I think would be desirable is a tool that allowed to build a customized 
> LiveCD, to keep up with the improvements on the kernel and the apps, so 
> everyone could choose her own set of apps.

That would be interesting, of course. I have almost no experience with
live cds but my feeling is that they would not be that useful for actual
work. Of course I would more than welcome to be proved wrong :-)

I have toyed with the idea of building one based on Panet CCRMA but have
done no actual work on it (save for a couple of tests of fedora based
live cds a while ago). It may (just may) be easier once I release a more
stable version of the Planet CCRMA distro. Polishing it is taking a long
time.

The ones I looked at, if I remember correctly, were Basilisk and Adios.

> Some useful links:
> 
> - Fedora live distros:
> 
> http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Live+CD&origin=All&basedon=Fedora&desktop=All&architecture=All&status=Active
> 
> - LiveCD building packages:
> 
> http://livecd.berlios.de/
> http://ibuild.livecd.net/
> 
> Some questions:
> 
> - Do liveCD builders work in Fedora?
> - Can the Planet kernel be ported to distros that are known to have livecd 
> builders (Debian, Mandrake)? (most likely a rpm based one, Mandrake thus, 
> but I have heard that Mandrake packages are not compatible with FC ones).

Debian would not make sense, DeMuDi (from the Agnula project) has
updated kernels for realtime work. 

As to compatibility with Mandrake, well, it depends on what you are
trying to install or build. Thac's RPMS for Mandrake provide a lot of
audio applications but I don't know (and too busy to check :-) if it
also provides a kernel. My guess is that each distro will have enough
differences so as to make direct porting of the kernel spec file not so
easy but I have not looked at the Mandrake ones for the kernel.

> - Should the Planet kernel be tweaked somehow (by including support of 
> features needed for livecd's, like squashfs or the like)? Should this be 
> done at the CCRMA repo or at an alternative one?

It could be done in Planet CCRMA itself, but probably only after taking
a good look at what is needed. Of course as long as what is needed does
not impact the use of the kernel as a "normal" kernel.

> - Does make any sense the idea of an audio livecd distro? Are there any 
> potential pitfalls that make it unpractical (e.g., memory, CPU or CD space 
> requirements...)?

I imagine being bound to memory would be a big obstacle, not for a demo,
of course, but for doing actual day to day work. Also, no matter how you
do things cdroms are slow and that will impact usability (ie: apps will
take a long time to launch). In certain circumstances they could be
invaluable but I'd just very much prefer using a good'old hard disk...

> Before going deeper in the subject myself, I thought I'd just open some 
> discussion about it in the list. Perhaps there is already someone involved 
> in such a project that I could join, or someone found some big cons to the 
> idea.
> 
> Any thoughts?

-- Fernando