- Joined
- Nov 8, 2001
I'm going to take knoppix or a variant of knoppix and remaster it. I want to slim down a lot of junk but I also need to keep it newbie and home-use friendly. This means I'll be working in a lot of little scripts to simplfy common commands. I'm wondering just what packages I should use. Obviously the usual xmms, openoffice, xcdrecord, xine, mplayer, opera, gimp... I'm tossed up on whether to use KDE or fluxbox, because I want it lightweight, yet KDE has that sort of windows feel to it that I need.
I don't want it stripped bare of hardcore stuff. Utilites for power-users are welcome additions, and even some server stuff like proftp and a web server that's lighter than apache. Samba, VNC, and SSH will have a place in this remastered distro as well.
I hear folders and crunchers all the time saying they'd go diskless if they knew something, anything about linux. I want to give them the ease of setup of knoppix, and write scripts for them to control and monitor their DC client of choice. But instead of a boring and complicated CLI like other DC diskless distros, this one will be full of packages to do almost any common task. I hope to lure them to the dark side, you see? They'll turn their barebones dedicated box on with my CD in it and maybe forget about it.... but then again, they might just try out some of the GNU apps and find they like the look and feel of linux. By virtue of its design and thanks to VNC, they won't need a HDD, monitor, mouse, or keyboard to fully appreciate the power of linux if they have a another computer on a home network.
I'm going implement overfoldix's folding scripts and maybe something similar for SETI so it'll d/l a client when it boots and the user can configure it, then it'll run in a small ramdrive. I'll try to script Samba so the user can just enter their workgroup name, samba user, and password at a prompt and have it configured to share the DC client to a windows box so EM3 will be a snap. This modified distro should be capable of running diskless and graphically from a remote connection, but also have everything you'd need in a desktop should you want to use it as such. It'd be a nice tool to troubleshoot any PC you came across that's not completely NTFS, just boot from the CD, mount the partitions, and you have a host of tools to dicker around with.
Ok, so I need you guys to think of what the most critical applications are- the ones you can't live without. I'm accepting CLI tools on the power-user side, but a lot of this remastered distro needs to be GUI and fairly user-friendly. You may say why bother, knoppix has a lot of great stuff.... but trust me, its full of junk the average user, and even most of us, will never use. So out with the junk and I can clear a couple hundred mb (and the way the data is compressed to fit on CD that 200mb will turn out to be much more than that).
Post any suggestions you have. Post if you want to lend a hand. Post if you want to beta test.
I can already tell you that it should be able to run diskless ok with 160mb of ram though I'd recommend 192mb as the minumum or preferably 256mb.
Here's the stuff I'm reading now... It actually doesn't look like it'll be very hard at all. Just got to pick all the good stuff and do some clever scripting.
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/
How to change boot logo. I'll be looking for someone who can handle GIMP for this probably...
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7
I probably won't start with a standard knoppix version because it contains so much stuff I'd have to remove, but instead will grab a thinner remastered version and add and remove from a smaller base system.
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/KnoppixCustomizations
I don't want it stripped bare of hardcore stuff. Utilites for power-users are welcome additions, and even some server stuff like proftp and a web server that's lighter than apache. Samba, VNC, and SSH will have a place in this remastered distro as well.
I hear folders and crunchers all the time saying they'd go diskless if they knew something, anything about linux. I want to give them the ease of setup of knoppix, and write scripts for them to control and monitor their DC client of choice. But instead of a boring and complicated CLI like other DC diskless distros, this one will be full of packages to do almost any common task. I hope to lure them to the dark side, you see? They'll turn their barebones dedicated box on with my CD in it and maybe forget about it.... but then again, they might just try out some of the GNU apps and find they like the look and feel of linux. By virtue of its design and thanks to VNC, they won't need a HDD, monitor, mouse, or keyboard to fully appreciate the power of linux if they have a another computer on a home network.
I'm going implement overfoldix's folding scripts and maybe something similar for SETI so it'll d/l a client when it boots and the user can configure it, then it'll run in a small ramdrive. I'll try to script Samba so the user can just enter their workgroup name, samba user, and password at a prompt and have it configured to share the DC client to a windows box so EM3 will be a snap. This modified distro should be capable of running diskless and graphically from a remote connection, but also have everything you'd need in a desktop should you want to use it as such. It'd be a nice tool to troubleshoot any PC you came across that's not completely NTFS, just boot from the CD, mount the partitions, and you have a host of tools to dicker around with.
Ok, so I need you guys to think of what the most critical applications are- the ones you can't live without. I'm accepting CLI tools on the power-user side, but a lot of this remastered distro needs to be GUI and fairly user-friendly. You may say why bother, knoppix has a lot of great stuff.... but trust me, its full of junk the average user, and even most of us, will never use. So out with the junk and I can clear a couple hundred mb (and the way the data is compressed to fit on CD that 200mb will turn out to be much more than that).
Post any suggestions you have. Post if you want to lend a hand. Post if you want to beta test.
I can already tell you that it should be able to run diskless ok with 160mb of ram though I'd recommend 192mb as the minumum or preferably 256mb.
Here's the stuff I'm reading now... It actually doesn't look like it'll be very hard at all. Just got to pick all the good stuff and do some clever scripting.
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/
How to change boot logo. I'll be looking for someone who can handle GIMP for this probably...
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7
I probably won't start with a standard knoppix version because it contains so much stuff I'd have to remove, but instead will grab a thinner remastered version and add and remove from a smaller base system.
http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/KnoppixCustomizations
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