I've been thinking about how to add to and update a version. One idea is to use a CDRW, then add/update the files incrementally (pulling them from a CVS server mebbe). How does this sound?
Do you mean update right to the CDRW? A CDRW would definately be useful during an update, so you don't have to make a dozen coasters while you test. However I don't think Linux packet writing is to the point where a CD could be updated directly (and might not be the most reliable thing anyway.)
If you have the HD space I imagine you could uncompress the distro to its own directory and install files to it (not sure how modified VL dir structure is, opinions?) using rpm --root /directory -ivh ... If you want to use urpmi you could chroot to that dir and just run urpmi like that.
Alternately (possibly more for the VL programmers) updates could be done in the form of binary diffs to the V-L ISO file. Not sure how well that would work out, but could make for a smaller download...
I have a plan ...
I have spent some thinking on the hd issue, and i have the results dispatched to the volounteers for this project .
The plan is to modify the bootscripts and firstrun setup to enable cd based boot with
the compressed image placed on other medium such as ram or drive .
This would also make it possible to put in rpm's, what stops you now is that the rpm database is too big for the ramdrive VL runs from, so we cant have that writable = rpm does not work.
With that and some more things hdbased, everything should work fine .
One question though, whats really the point of all of this ??
This distribution is supposed to run with as little hassle as possible, not needing to have
/ alter any partitions and such,now it seems that people would like to have a cd based
distro that requires a harddrive and more config options... hmm
Feels to me that a normal mandrake is far better and faster ??
I have however decided to go ahead and make it all possible .
Ideas , thoughts about this matter ?
_________________
Marten VirtualLinux Author
I have to admit that I haven't run virtual-linux yet (downloading now) but have been impressed enough with knoppix 3.1 to have visions of entire offices running complete distributions on every desktop with no need to install or configure anything directly.
Has anyone considered putting the compressed iso image in a file on a server and sharing it read-only through the network block device? The clients would then connect the cloop device to their side of the nbd to uncompress it. This would greatly reduce the disk and network usage on the server side compared to NFS and ensure that clients can't possibly modify the installed programs. Home directories and any other writable space would be normal NFS or samba mounts and you'd probably want server-based authentication (NIS/LDAP). Booting from a floppy or over the network like the Linux Terminal Server Project would be ideal, but even if it still takes a CD to boot, making the final connection to a server would eliminate the size restrictions and would permit updating the applications without having to distribute new CDs to everyone using them. It would also free the CD for other uses when running.
Can you auto-detect the network card early enough in the boot sequence to make this work without having to make custom kernels for each type?
Yep, thats possible ..
The different nics could be identified by the kernel, modules loaded, dhcp client would get an ip and so on long before we need any kind of cloop image mounted, this is actually what happens today, beside that we have no nic modules avaliable before the cloop is mounted .
Im not shure what kind of performance we will get though, but with a switched 100 mbit network, i guess it should work fine, if all the guys does'nt boot the same second ..
Might be a lot of collisions and therefore slow performance ..
Feel free to make a network bootable version from Virtual Linux, would be a very nice additive ..
