Developers' Blogs: boobaa

Last Saturday I have fed up with the fact that I could not give a Frugalware LiveCD to my boss with OpenOffice.org on it. I have killed a fairly great amount of time since then with regenerating the iso several ten times, but it has been "finished" by now.

Main issues: dropped Gnome, dropped XFCE, dropped a plenty of file managers, dropped a lots of things. But there is KDE with educational programs (as I work in a secondary school), there is OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, K3b, Gaim, XMMS, MPlayer, GIMP, XChat, amaroK, there is a dhcp-based network by default, there is a working mouse wheel (at least my USB one does work) - and every one of them in Hungarian.

Nevertheless there is a little glitch: the keyboard is only half-Hungarian, as I got question marks instead of hungarumlauts, and the AltGr behaves as Alt. So there is more work to do - if it suits one's fancy, who has big bandwidth (the CD contains about 5-600 packages, can't remember the exact number), big place to kill (the build needs about 2,5GiB in /var/tmp/livecd, and an additional ~800MiB in the working directory), and terribly great amount of time (after compiling kernel and sysconfig, and downloading the fpm's, it costs a little bit more than an hour over here at me).

I have modified the build process a bit. Before this release it behaved like installing this package groups, then that ones, then install some additional packages - but yay, we have run out of space, so let's remove some packages. Now only base and xorg-core groups gets installed as a whole, then several more applications - there is no removing step, so the build consists of only two steps. I have prepared a Makefile as well, so one should work through to the iso by issuing only one make command.

If I can recall correctly, I did not touch anything else - I tried xconfig's --live switch, but this does not work from init scripts for unknown reasons. Er, the stuff can be reached here.