Re: Live CD 2.14

[Brent Smith <gnome nextreality net>]

Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 14:33 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 13:13 +0100, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> >
> > > I wonder, how much does this Linux/X/GNOME/Distro
> > > stack hurt us, and how much does it help us?
> >
> > We normally change very Ubuntu-specific stuff in the LiveCD, where that
> > is easy. For instance, we use Epiphany instead of Firefox and change the
> > theme to the GNOME default.
> >
> > But Marcus Bauer obviously didn't get much feedback about his 2.14
> > LiveCD, so he can hardly be blamed if it isn't perfect.
>
>
> So during the 2.13 cycle, Brent made a VMPlayer image
> for Gnome.  I don't think it ever got released to the
> general public, but a number of our documentation folks
> were using it.
>
> As I understand it, Brent used the LiveCD stuff as a
> starting point for the image, which in turn is based
> off of Ubuntu.
>
> Both processes sound similar to me, just different in
> how they ultimately "encode" the final operating system.
> This naturally leads me to ask if we could have a team
> that produces both a VM and a LiveCD for every one of
> our unstable releases.  It seems to me that, if you're
> already making one, making the other shouldn't be much
> additional effort.
>
> Documentation people seem to really like using the VM,
> so that would provide a number of test users who are
> really hammering into the system.  If the VM and LiveCD
> come from the same setup, then feedback on one equals
> feedback on the other.
>
> --
> Shaun

Just for reference, here are some details on the VM I made.

First of all, it was pretty hackish.  I did an Ubuntu server
install in the VM, and then compiled GNOME from jhbuild on
my workstation.  I gzip/tar'd my /opt/gnome2 directory and then
copied this over to the VM.  I did quite a bit of work to
make dbus and other things work with within the VM and then
installed needed dependency libraries using apt-get.  This was
a trial an error process involving running ldd on the /opt/gnome2/bin
binaries and looking for unresolved symbols.  I was able to get
most things to run this way to produce a stock GNOME VM for
Joachim to work with for documentation.

This is obviously fundamentally different than the way the LiveCD
is created, since I assume that uses packages from Dapper Drake.

We keep coming back to this issue regarding vendors version of GNOME
being significanly different than the documentation for stock GNOME. 
IMO, I think we need to address our doc architecture to make it easily
pluggable for vendors.  One such effort that I saw for this, was making
a framework for customizing menu locations.  I think this is a good
start.

--
Brent Smith <gnome nextreality net>
IRC: smitten