Re: [school-discuss] Live CD: DIY vs. Distribution

[Ben Armstrong <synrg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 21:48:43 +0000
John Frank <jjjfffrank@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I agree here. I do not have the time to DIY linux.

I would not discourage anyone here from trying to make it easier for
users who need Linux to "just work".  Developers of applications and
distributions alike should all be aware of this and work towards
making the situation better.  And the good news is, in recent years
great strides have been made in this direction.

But Schoolforge is large and includes quite a number of different kinds
of people with different skills.  I believe there is a need to be able
to rapidly produce a live CD (or I could say more generally, an "open
source software solution") for a particular audience, customized to meet
their needs.  In your case, I would not necessarily expect you to
prepare such a thing on your own.  This is where the Schoolforge
community comes into play.  With a very small amount of effort from
those who are here and willing to help, it would be possible to craft
for you, or for any Schoolforge member, a live CD that exactly meets
your needs.  I am not a big believer in "one size fits all" solutions.

Of course, I don't discount at all the usefulness of a "sampler" CD
that exists soley to get people interested in some of the software that
exists and start to play with it.  That is a niche that live CDs have
traditionally filled.  But there are already projects devoted to
crafting distributions for education that have their own live CD.  The
Debian Edu (http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu) project comes to mind.
For those who are looking for such a thing, why don't we get to work
populating this page with links?

http://www.schoolforge.net/education-software/compilations-live-cd

So that brings me back to my original argument: should Schoolforge really
be in the business of producing a live CD "distribution"?  I believe it
should not be.  We should just facilitate the member projects using live
CD technology to meet their various and particular needs.  We can either
point members at existing projects, or we can equip them to produce
their own using Debian-live, or a similar toolkit.

Ben
--
 ,-.  nSLUG    http://www.nslug.ns.ca   synrg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 \`'  Debian   http://www.debian.org    synrg@xxxxxxxxxx
  `          [ gpg 395C F3A4 35D3 D247 1387 2D9E 5A94 F3CA 0B27 13C8 ]
             [ pgp 7F DA 09 4B BA 2C 0D E0 1B B1 31 ED C6 A9 39 4F ]