Looking to hire someone to make a customised knoppix distro

Hi,

I work for a health development project in Tanzania (non-commercial, non-profit, development assistance). We are developing health information software (which we will distribute under the GPL licence). We have MySQL as the backend, tomcat and JSP for the web-based user interface. The users of the system will often be people with very basic computer skills so the interface is a very simple point and press thing.

We think it would be useful to be able to distribute the whole system (including about 700Mb of data) on a CD. Here's the vision: the user takes the CD, pops it into their computer, boots, there is no login to confuse them, the browser opens automatically. They make some selections and produce their output (charts or tables in a web-page). They then save the output to their local hard drive (almost all will be using various flavours of MS Windows). When they are finished they take out the CD and reboot. Or, if they have a network, perhaps they could leave it running and have several people access the data. This way they don't have to install anything on their machine (we have seen specialised software trash too many OS installations and cause havoc [yes, they were all based on MS Access]).

I understand that knoppix does some neat compression stuff and I am hoping that the 700mb database will not take up all the space. I have taken a brief look at knoppix and could, in time, work out if it is feasible to do this, and then work out how to do it. But I don't have enough time. We are therefore looking for people with experience in customising knoppix who might be interested in:

i) discussing the feasibility of this and working with us to develop the design specification

ii) actually making the thing. We are creating the analysis system (database, analysis tools, user-interface) so "making" in this context means getting it into a trimmed-down knoppix distribution with the data.

I am not looking for a freebie here, we have money to hire someone to do this for us.

I hope it is appropriate to make this sort of posting here (please let me know if not and where I could try if this is not appropriate). Please email me (dave AT ammp.or.tz) if you are interested in something like this.

Thanks.

Dave

A full 700mb Knoppix CD is actually about 1.75GB of compressed data. You shouldn't have trouble fitting what you need into a remaster that starts out pretty minimal.

Hi Dave
I'm looking at a similar project from a different perspective, just having knoppix on the CD and data on the hard disk so that users can add local data if they want. I will mull over your idea & see what I can come up with. I have started a thread elsewhere - 'CD-based Knoppix as webserver?'
I hope we will be able to collaborate.

All the best
Dave

Hi Dave,

Sorry I haven't replied before now -- I wanted to sort out some details before making an update here. I received a few emails from people offering to work on this. Mike Huffman is was the first to get in touch and offer to do this using the exact spec. that we desired and is working on it for us now. We worked out the details of the design spec. together, but he is the one who would be most useful in terms of sharing practical ideas -- I said what we wanted and he is making it happen.

I am not sure if he follows this forum actively, so if you want to get in touch with him you could email me at dave AT ammp.or.tz and I'll forward your email to him. He said he is quite happy to share his experiences regarding the development of this. You can decide between you whether or not it would be best to continue discussions on this forum so that others can benefit from the ideas and experiences.

If anyone thinks it would be helpful if I posted more details about what decided we want the design to look like I could do that.

Dave.

Dave, thats good. thanks for the reply. I'm just a bit intrigued; will you be using older machines etc. I'm using a system with 350mhz pentium, 128Mb memory & a 2Gb HDD and its pretty slow when using KDE & data off the cd, even though diagnostics show not all physical memory is being used, ie no hard disk swap being used(I've allowed up to 80mb for that). If you can use a minimal browser (not mozilla) it may be faster. Client PCs reading the data via the webserver are pretty effective.

We haven't really tried to specify a minimum spec on which we want this to run, we have discussed the need for something that uses as few of resources as possible in the hope that it will run on most machines. Our main audience for this will be people working in Health and development in Tanzania, probably mostly in government or NGO offices, and they will have a variety of types of equipment. Some could be similar to the spec. you mention, but there have also been a number of initiatives to improve the availability of PCs here (incl. distribution of PCs to districts and the lifting of VAT from the sale of PCs) so I am also hoping that most of the people for whom we want to provide access to the data will have machines with a reasonable spec.

The idea is for the application to work pretty much like a kiosk (I think) so we don't need much (any?) of the functionality that KDE/GNOME add. The browser can also be very simple: I tested Dillo (very light, astonishingly fast) but it doesn't seem to be able to handle some aspects of our application (something to do with sessions I think).

So, we are going for a light-weight window manager and light-weight browser. Mike is going to try out various combinations to see what provides the best performance.

In our office we have quite a range of machines, including a few 350Mhz machines with 32Mb of RAM. When we have a demo to play with I'll try it out on everything we have and report the results. When testing on some of the older machines I think I could have a lot of time for preparing my notes :)