greenfly
01-10-2008, 06:02 PM
Hi Knoppix forum,
I've had an idea rattling around in the back of my mind for some time now (actually since around the time I wrote this online article (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/5964) a few years ago) once I saw just how powerful the ability to remaster Knoppix without remastering was. There are a million remastered Knoppix variants out there, and a lot of them essentially change a theme or two, swap out a few packages, and then create a new name with "ix" on the end. Then everyone who wants to use them has to download another 650Mb ISO and carry around another special-purpose CD with them. You could achieve a lot of these same changes either by booting Knoppix and creating a custom disk image, or just creating a saveconfig-type tarball and knoppix.sh combination.
I've done just this in the past where I would have a "sysadmin" customization with all my admin tools on it, and other special customizations all stored in different directories on my usb key. Then at boot time I could just point Knoppix to one or the other directory depending on what I wanted to do.
Well here's my idea. I'm sure a lot of you also have particularly interesting persistent disk images you have set up for special purposes. What if there were some sort of shared repository (almost like VMware's virtual appliance site) where all of these interesting customizations could be shared and possibly rated, etc. so the really useful ones are easy to identify? The benefit of this in my mind is that it might save some people from having to go through a full remaster when they see a persistent disk image someone else created that they could just tweak instead, plus these disk images take up a lot less space than a site full of .iso images. The extra benefit is that these sorts of tweaks (depending on what you do) generally seem to work across new Knoppix releases (at worst if you install packages you might have to change the package versions you use) so it presumably wouldn't be a huge problem to maintain updates if Knoppix also had a new release.
So, any thoughts or opinions about this? Is it just a solution looking for a problem?
I've had an idea rattling around in the back of my mind for some time now (actually since around the time I wrote this online article (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/5964) a few years ago) once I saw just how powerful the ability to remaster Knoppix without remastering was. There are a million remastered Knoppix variants out there, and a lot of them essentially change a theme or two, swap out a few packages, and then create a new name with "ix" on the end. Then everyone who wants to use them has to download another 650Mb ISO and carry around another special-purpose CD with them. You could achieve a lot of these same changes either by booting Knoppix and creating a custom disk image, or just creating a saveconfig-type tarball and knoppix.sh combination.
I've done just this in the past where I would have a "sysadmin" customization with all my admin tools on it, and other special customizations all stored in different directories on my usb key. Then at boot time I could just point Knoppix to one or the other directory depending on what I wanted to do.
Well here's my idea. I'm sure a lot of you also have particularly interesting persistent disk images you have set up for special purposes. What if there were some sort of shared repository (almost like VMware's virtual appliance site) where all of these interesting customizations could be shared and possibly rated, etc. so the really useful ones are easy to identify? The benefit of this in my mind is that it might save some people from having to go through a full remaster when they see a persistent disk image someone else created that they could just tweak instead, plus these disk images take up a lot less space than a site full of .iso images. The extra benefit is that these sorts of tweaks (depending on what you do) generally seem to work across new Knoppix releases (at worst if you install packages you might have to change the package versions you use) so it presumably wouldn't be a huge problem to maintain updates if Knoppix also had a new release.
So, any thoughts or opinions about this? Is it just a solution looking for a problem?