Re: gEDA-user: A thought on installs/deployment

[al davis <ad106@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 06 June 2006 18:40, Mike Hansen wrote:
> ...........VMWare Player(it's free) ...........
No.  It isn't.  

Please don't confuse shareware/crippleware/etc.  with true 
Free/open-source (GPL, etc) software.

> ...........  a very quick way to get 
> users up and running w/o all the install hastle would be to
> create a VMWare image of a distro+geda and then make it
> available on the internet.  Perhaps we can make it available
> via some torrent so no one has to source a 1G download.  But
> this would be a quick and painless way to get users going and
> would be a nice way to draw Windows users into the fold.  Any
> thoughts on this one, anyone think it's worth putting any
> effort into it?

Someone needs to maintain it, other than the developers.  (See 
my other mail on this topic.)   Even so, there are distribution 
restrictions that may make it illegal to distribute freely.

I think (and have said so before) that a Knoppix (hot CD) 
variant with gEDA tools is the answer.  You boot from the CD 
and run from it without installing anything.   Performance is 
slow, but you do get to try it with no risk, even on borrowed 
computers that you can't install on.  It is easy to make a 
modified version of Knoppix with our software on it.

There's one already available:
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html
Here's the package list:
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian/quantian_0.7.9.2.quantian.packages.txt