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I like the idea of an i386 CD and an amd64 USB-HDD version, personally.

At this point I wouldn't be worrying about supporting every single piece of hardware, I'd be looking at getting something that works well first. Keeping versions to a minimum helps.
 
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i know that the easy answer is 'both' ...
Doesn't Ubuntu have this problem solved? I thought that you could take an Ubuntu ISO, put it on a USB drive (with the appropriate tools) and boot into a system that has persistent storage. I haven't actually tried the persistent storage part but I have installed and run live CDs from ISOs copied to USB flash drives.

I highly recommend supporting both if at all possible. And if you can do that using one ISO image, so much the better. IMO it's worth taking the time to do that up front because it will pay off every time you update in the future and ease of doing that will factor into the long term success of the effort.

As far as 32 vs. 64 bit flavors, I lean toward abandoning 32 bit. This is a distro oriented toward high performance systems. Are there any systems that only run 32 bit S/W that can be considered in any way high performance? Even my more recent Atom based systems are 64bit capable (though I run 32 bit S/W on them.)

I can't participate with testing at this time. Pretty much everything I have is crunching for the Rosetta contest and we don't exactly have credits to spare for that. But once we get past that I plan to help more.
 
Doesn't Ubuntu have this problem solved? I thought that you could take an Ubuntu ISO, put it on a USB drive (with the appropriate tools) and boot into a system that has persistent storage. I haven't actually tried the persistent storage part but I have installed and run live CDs from ISOs copied to USB flash drives.

I highly recommend supporting both if at all possible. And if you can do that using one ISO image, so much the better. IMO it's worth taking the time to do that up front because it will pay off every time you update in the future and ease of doing that will factor into the long term success of the effort.

As far as 32 vs. 64 bit flavors, I lean toward abandoning 32 bit. This is a distro oriented toward high performance systems. Are there any systems that only run 32 bit S/W that can be considered in any way high performance? Even my more recent Atom based systems are 64bit capable (though I run 32 bit S/W on them.)

I can't participate with testing at this time. Pretty much everything I have is crunching for the Rosetta contest and we don't exactly have credits to spare for that. But once we get past that I plan to help more.

yeah, unfortunately that is an ubuntu only thing at the moment. i'm not exactly sure how they accomplish it, but from what i seen online, it isn't possible with debian (assuming it has something to do with the 'casper' package which is used by ubuntu).


right now the usb-hdd option isn't looking very good for implementation as it requires a much different and complicated process in which to edit the images. creating the typical base images which can be downloaded from the debian mirrors is simple. it is the process of adding all of the customizations which is a huge pain, to say the least. the usb-hdd images are 'x86 boot sector' files (block device in a file) where the iso and iso-hybrid images are 'ISO 9660' files (cd/dvd in a file).

while overclockix is about higher end computing, i also want it to be able to be used for troubleshooting systems which is pretty much the only thing keeping me from dumping the i386 arch. at the same time, i do see your point as there are specific distros that are more aimed at troubleshooting, maintenance and recovery.
 
just to keep things up to date as to how things are progressing on the usb-hdd setup... i was able to successfully write a script which can rebuild usb-hdd images. it was a huge pain and i still need to test the script fully to make sure that i didn't break anything else while modifying it.

for an iso, all it has to do to re-write is:
Code:
                genisoimage -r -V "cd" -cache-inodes -J -l -o newcd.iso \
                -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat \
                -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table iso/

                isohybrid.pl newcd.iso

for a usb-hdd image, it has to do all of this junk:
Code:
                img_name=newbinary.img
                img_size=`du -ms iso | cut -f1`
                img_size=$((img_size+2))
                dd if=/dev/zero of=${img_name} bs=1024k count=0 seek=${img_size}

                losetup /dev/loop0 ${img_name}
                losetup -o 512 /dev/loop1 /dev/loop0

                parted -s /dev/loop1 mklabel msdos
                parted -s /dev/loop1 mkpart primary ext2 0.0 100%
                parted -s /dev/loop1 set 1 boot on
                parted -s /dev/loop1 set 1 lba off
                dd if=chroot/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/loop1 bs=440 count=1

                mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n OVERCLOCKIX /dev/loop1

                syslinux /dev/loop1

                sleep 1
                losetup -d /dev/loop1
                sleep 1
                losetup -d /dev/loop0

                rm -rf temp
                mkdir temp
                mount -o loop,offset=512 ${img_name} temp/

                cp -R -T -L iso/ temp/

                sleep 1
                umount temp/

looking back on it, it all makes perfect sense but figuring out all of those steps was a bear! i didn't find a whole lot of help online and ended up reverse engineering the live-build script. my brain certainly got a bit of a workout today :D

*edit: now that i think about it, it might be possible to share a squashfs so that the same root file system is used for the iso-hybrid and usb-hdd builds. i will have to do some testing with that in the next few days...
 
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IF you could... Let me know when it is done and I can start to archive it. There is some efforts, I like to keep just so the idea does not get lost altogether. This is one of them.
 
IF you could... Let me know when it is done and I can start to archive it. There is some efforts, I like to keep just so the idea does not get lost altogether. This is one of them.

are you talking about the scripts, images or both? i'm going to make everything i have available (most of it is already at www.overclockix.com). right now the images are far from being complete as nothing visually has been customized and there aren't any distributed computing scripts yet. i will definitely make an announcement when it is finally released. :thup:
 
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for .006, i am adding the 'persistent' boot option so the system will look for a partition labeled as 'live-rw' and use it for persistence. i am also adding the 'dnsutils' package. i should have it uploaded by 8am EST today or so. this will only be the iso-hybrid images so far. if i can, i will get a usb-hdd image out soon which will help with development for those of you interested in the distributed computing projects so that WUs and the like will not be lost between reboots.
 
the .006 ISOs have been uploaded.

having never really done any folding or and distributed computing project on linux, what packages need to be installed? i remember Shelnutt2 mentioning wine... anything else?
 
the .006 ISOs have been uploaded.

having never really done any folding or and distributed computing project on linux, what packages need to be installed? i remember Shelnutt2 mentioning wine... anything else?

I suppose wine could be used for any DC projects that don't have Linux binaries.

Edit: I see that folding@home is not on the list of projects in my copy of BOINC so I guess not all DC projects have Linux binaries.

This is what I have:
Code:
hbarta@cypress:~$ dpkg -l|grep boinc 2>/dev/null
ii  boinc                                 6.10.58+dfsg-3                                    metapackage for the BOINC client and the manager
ii  boinc-client                          6.10.58+dfsg-3                                    core client for the BOINC distributed computing infrastructure
ii  boinc-manager                         6.10.58+dfsg-3                                    GUI to control and monitor the BOINC core client

Ubuntu has some packages for the specific projects like SETI, but I don't see any reason to use them since BOINC will download any required applications. I suppose one exception to this is the enhanced binaries such as those that Lunatics provides for SETI. Those require manual installation on a normal system and I'm not sure you want to try to do more than that here. They do depend on processor capabilities.
 
the .006 ISOs have been uploaded.

having never really done any folding or and distributed computing project on linux, what packages need to be installed? i remember Shelnutt2 mentioning wine... anything else?

For folding: no special packages required, except that the SMP client will need the 64 bit version; the Uniprocessor client runs fine in the 32 bit version.
Wine can be used to run the Windows SMP executable in a 32 bit OS, as well as the GPU client, but things are changing with the upcoming v7 client, making the use of Wine unnecessary.

For BOINC projects like SETI or Rosetta@home: just need package: boinc (6.10.58+dfsg-3)
 
For folding: no special packages required, except that the SMP client will need the 64 bit version; the Uniprocessor client runs fine in the 32 bit version.
Wine can be used to run the Windows SMP executable in a 32 bit OS, as well as the GPU client, but things are changing with the upcoming v7 client, making the use of Wine unnecessary.

For BOINC projects like SETI or Rosetta@home: just need package: boinc (6.10.58+dfsg-3)
ok, good to hear about this v7 client. sounds pretty promising. once the desktop environment is selected, the first thing i intend on doing is getting an amd64 build started. i will add the 'boinc' package to the next build as well.


i've just been looking over known ways to save some space with the images and i was thinking about removing extra locales with 'localepurge'. can anyone think of a valid reason why i should include any languages besides english (en_US.UTF-8)? it saves about 140-150MB which is huge savings for a live distro.
 
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I say ditch them and provide a script that will install the language of your choice (or from a handful of choices)

Again something I would take on but I am yet again without internet which makes involvement right now tough for me
 
yeah, the only 'problem' is that localepurge gets rid of the language files and the only way that you can get them back is by reinstalling the packages and it will continue to purge packages after you run apt commands unless you disable it. with that being said, i don't really see many non-english speaking folks to use this. by default, it sets the language to en_US.UTF-8 on boot anyway. i'm not sure how many people would really even know how to change the language :)
 
purging the extra locales reduced the required disk space quite a bit for each image:

639M overclockix_gnome-core/overclockix_gnome-core-.006.iso
513M overclockix_lxde/overclockix_lxde-.006.iso
473M overclockix_xfce/overclockix_xfce-.006.iso


501M overclockix_gnome-core/overclockix_gnome-core-.007.iso
439M overclockix_lxde/overclockix_lxde-.007.iso
417M overclockix_xfce/overclockix_xfce-.007.iso

i will upload these tomorrow morning.

*edit: uploads are going slow... i forgot to toss the ISOs on my external drive so i am uploading them from my home connection :-/
 
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just for an update... i spent the weekend working on making the usb-hdd builds easier to manage. this includes adding the ability to share a squashfs with it's iso-hybrid counterpart which cuts the work needed to maintain overclockix in half. i will have a usb-hdd build (using gnome-core since that is in the lead for which desktop environment overclockix will use) online by tomorrow morning so people can start testing them with USB sticks and add persistence by creating an additional partition on the same USB drive.

i also added the following packages to all of the builds to support the usb-hdd build process:
  • mtools
  • parted
  • syslinux

i am also adding:
  • flashplugin-nonfree
  • wireshark
to the .008 builds

*edit: i also fixed some odd permissions of the root filesystem which caused a few minor errors. they will be updated & fixed for .008
 
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get me back on track bently! :thup: i am quite lost as to what we need to be doing here to contribute.

you are going to upload everything tonight right? :shrug:
 
yeah, i am going to upload the usb-hdd image right now actually (which can be written to a usb flash drive/external hdd) and allows for persistence (saves any changes you make). i will upload the normal .008 ISOs tomorrow morning from work (to save bandwidth).

i'll add another post when i have uploaded the usb-hdd image successfully. it should take about an hour and a half to upload if i had to guess.

*edit: on the topic of what all can be done to contribute, the biggest thing that i could use is feedback and suggestions for applications, etc. i also need some suggestions for wallpapers (would like them to be overclockers.com related or something made for overclockix). i have most things listed in the contributor section
 
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the usb-hdd image has been uploaded and you can obtain it from here. if you can, please test it using the instructions i have written for usb persistence.

the new usb-hdd image is 542M and it has all of the same packages as the gnome-core ISO build.
 
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