At the last OCLUG meeting I presented a possible club project. After
some discussion by phone and email, here is the revised proposal,
hopefully pared down to essentials but still widely useful.
OCLUG liveUSB
Statement of goals
- a liveUSB that can be booted on a very wide array of hardware
-- relatively compact, but modern kernel and related software
-- possibility of adding content in a writeable area. This could
be documents or music files. Software may need remastering to
add.
- convenient remastering
- use cases:
-- "appliances" such as DanceBox, specialized access to NAS etc.
-- modest test tool for hardware
-- mechanism to present training and teaching. I'm thinking of
examples like training for R where one needs some software and
data, or the GIMP tutorial OCLUG ran a few years ago, the
dance wiki ottawaenglishdance.org runs, or Robert Day's courses.
- generate interest in Linux/OCLUG etc. by using this as a promotional
and educational effort
- enough documentation that others could reproduce the process. A brief
guide to customization would add value.
Status:
- Scott and I used archlinux-2016.06.01-dual.iso, and I have quickly
checked that I can dd this to a USB and boot on an EFI and a non-EFI
laptop, even on a non-pae 32bit EEE netbook. This "system" boots to
a command line. There is no window manager or desktop, so quite a
bit of work to be done to make it attractive to general users.
- So far I do not have a clean and simple approach for remastering
a running version of this system to allow for customization.
- I re-built my 2012 DanceBox liveUSB (32 bit Crunch Bang base) using
Bunsenlabs Hydrogen 64 bit. This is a successor to Crunch Bang, and
the Crunchmaster remastering script was a huge help. I created a
second VFAT partition on the USB to allow Windows users to copy mp3
and other music files there. The USB boots into Thunar pointing to
the music directory in this partition. There is a customized
desktop with keyboard shortcuts. Users can select music by
means of the arrow keys and Enter to play. However, only boots
on legacy 64bit systems.
Next?:
- If there is interest, I suggest
-- a list of interested people for low-volume email exchange
-- one or two face-time sessions. I'll volunteer my dance space. Have
large screen and reasonable internet.
-- a section of the wiki to record what we do.
Suggested time frame is about 6 months, but low level of effort.
Please get in touch with me if interested.
Many thanks to Alex, Dmitriy, Scott and Woody for comments and ideas.
John Nash, 2016-11-25 nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca