Re: [seul-edu] Re: Unified Front... blame server, meta-distro

[Doug Loss <drloss@suscom.net>]

Leon Brooks wrote:

> On Thursday 25 April 2002 22:56, Stephen C. Daukas wrote:
> > I believe the LSB is the standard to follow, because it
> > allows binary distributions of software to run on any Linux system of a
> > given architecture, regardless of which distro is being used.
>
> LSB is designed to solve on specific set of problems, which it does. However,
> LSB is not a silver bullet for cross-distro compatibility.
>
> The bottom line is that it would be no more work, and probably much less, to
> produce your own distro, based on one of the common ones (and the easiest
> would be Mandrake because all of the tools to do that ship with it), but at
> that point you've just killed choices again if you only stick with one.
>
> I think there is a reasonable answer.
>

Yup.  I think we _have_ to make this as distro-neutral as possible.  If we do it
properly, the various distro vendors can take our work and tailor it to their own
distros if they like.  But if we pick one to write to, we'll be removing any
incentive the others have to include our work.  Besides, we want users to be able
to take our ISO and use it as widely as possible, and that means making the fewest
distro customizations possible.

>
> > Then, and of course some will tell me I'm optimistic, you make an effort to
> > get vendors interested in it.  Let them run with an "educational bundle"
> > and worry about all the business issues.
>
> And of course, different `vendors' will react in diverse ways to different
> packages. Stuff that RedHat are happy with will raise hair at Debian. BTW,
> I'm not just whinging, I'm aiming at a point.
>

As I say, make it as neutral as possible and let them customize it as they desire.

>
> > OK, I'm going to ask a simple question.  If we provided a ISO of the top N
> > educational apps, HOW-TOs, documentation, war stories, got permission to
> > distribute Star/Open Office, perhaps more, whatever (what I referred to
> > once as a package), would that be enough to get a district excited and
> > successful, or must we also include a Linux distro?
>
> OpenOffice.org (and you need to use the .org because there is an unrelated
> OpenOffice without the .org) is GPL. You don't need permission. StarOffice is
> not. OO 641d ships with Mandrake 8.2 and works very well.
>

Unless we have lots of space left, I'd say leave off OO, at least until you're
sure you've included everything else first.  I'd hate to see one large app take
25-30% of the available space and crowd out numerous smaller, deserving apps.

>
> > If the latter, then I'm right back to my previous statement - you have to
> > choose one distro to run with, and you have to make it easy to run.
>
> If it works on RedHat, it'll almost always work on Mandrake and SuSE
> unmodified. For the sake of better integration, a recompilation for those
> distros is almost certainly worthwhile. You will also not need to ship some
> stuff for particular distros, just let the distro itself deal with those
> parts, and pad the ISO out with other stuff.
>

My point.  Perhaps we can make a second ISO with ancillary apps that are already
available on most distros (MySQL, SSH, etc.)?  Or is that getting a bit too
grandiose?

>
> > Only having briefly looked over some of the info I've learned about
> > recently, would our ISO be suitable to bundle with the terminal server
> > effort, or others out there?
>
> Mandrake 9.0 will include LTSP. For distros that don't, it would be useful to
> include LTSP on their flavour of the distro.
>

I'd put LTSP in the "ancillary apps" category I just dreamed up above.

>
> My solution to all of the above complaint is to work with the GNU configure
> script. That way it doesn't *matter* whether the distro is LSB or not, and
> you'll have the added advantage of having stuff work on Solaris, HP-UX, *BSD
> and so on (-: even Windows, with CygWin :-).
>

I strongly recommend this also.

> And if we do this, please, please document the processes and stick up HOWTOs
> (ie, HOWTO convert a project to configure, with examples; HOWTO cope with
> variations in distribution with configure; HOWTO semi-automatically produce
> packages for a heap of distros and so on).
>

More sage advice.

>
> The common parts of the script will include production of .spec files and the
> like for building RPMs, DPKGs, SlackWare tar-gzips and whatever else for
> various platforms and architectures. I'd like to think that a new release of
> distro will involve nothing more than having a server thrash around for a day
> or so recompiling everything, repackaging it and tacking together a spread of
> ISOs.
>

I hope that it can be this easy, as I'd like to see this also available for
LinuxPPC at the least.
--
Doug Loss                 All I want is a warm bed
Data Network Coordinator  and a kind word and
Bloomsburg University     unlimited power.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Ashleigh Brilliant