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

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Saturday 27 April 2002 00:10, Doug Loss wrote:
> Leon Brooks wrote:
>>> 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.

OTOH, if office applications answer 70% of a school's requirements, it would 
be criminal to leave it out.

IMHO, there should also be a CD consisting entirely of Windows stuff which 
also runs on Linux unchanged. This will better enable mixed environments in 
which some workstations are unable to be completely exorcised.

>> 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.

Excellent!

>> 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.

I think this is actually critical because it (1) is entirely in the GPL spirit 
and (2) `empowers' (now _there's_ an abused word) infiltration efforts in 
other feilds.

>> 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.

Mandrake has published scripts for assembling an entire distro from scratch. 
It is a fairly straightforward matter to lop out a bunch of stuff you won't 
be using on a student workstation, graft in a passel of educational apps, 
sort out the dependencies and then hammer the life out of your hard drive and 
end up with a complete CD or few ready to install. I'd be surprised if RedHat 
and SuSE didn't have near equivalents. Debian's concept of `a distribution' 
is not as black-and-white, so it should be even easier to deal with.

At the end of the day, one will have to sort out a few distribution-specific 
dependency trees to get the basic stuff in place, and after that it should be 
a matter of typing a single command (heck, bury it in an icon if you like) to 
produce all of the CDs for all of the distributions and variants (and/or 
standalone distributions) that your heart desires. In a school, of course, 
you can distribute the workload (ie, assign one compile load to a machine and 
build the whole lot in parallel; and/or in a lab full of such machines, burn 
in parallel).

We should be able to offer either a support CD for most major distributions, 
or a CD (set) for at least a few of the major ones which is complete (ie, 
cram it into a bare machine and wind up with an education-centred workstation 
or server).

Cheers; Leon