[TriLUG] Hamfest thanks

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Get me a logo!  :)  Once you are going to go to the trouble of 
remastering the disc, changing things is really quite easy.  Remastering 
involves decompressing the compressed filesystem, editing it to your 
heart's content, then recompressing it and plugging it back in place on 
the iso filesystem, then remastering the iso.  There are supposedly 
canned scripts to do most of the heavy lifting now, just takes about 2.2 
gigs of free disc space to decompress the image, and a goodly bit of 
machine time to recompress it.

As a thought experiment, consider this... In the past I took and 
stripped down a Knoppix distro so it would fit on a 650M CD-RW (no gui) 
and boot up into a custom set of PERL scripts.  It's purpose was to run 
a museum exhibit for the Natural Science Center in Greensboro (a tooth 
exhibit).  It created a ram disc, copied over some wave files and 
support files to the ram disc, and then ran entirely out of ram.  This 
cut the need for a hard drive, floppy, or any other moving parts but the 
fans, and the CD-ROM which didn't spin after boot up.  If the machine 
ever breaks, just throw the disc in a new machine and you're good to 
go!  :)  I even had it read the wave files and perl scripts from the 
ISO, instead of from inside the compressed image, so that it was easy to 
change the sounds or scripts with out having to dig through the 
compressed image again. 

Very cool things are possible with Knoppix as a base, and some creative 
thinking.  We could easily make up a TriLUG branded disc with all the 
power of a Knoppix disc, and some good links to local support, etc.  
That would probably sell well at a Hamfest or any where else.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner

Tanner Lovelace wrote:

> Aaron S. Joyner said the following on 4/6/04 7:44 AM:
>
>> Okay, the state of remastering knoppix distributions has gotten an 
>> awful lot easier since last I looked.  :)  For just changing the 
>> default language and bootup options, there are even *gasp* widows 
>> wrappers for doing it now!  :)  I have an ISO that ought to do the 
>> trick, I'll give it a test when I get home from work tonight and see 
>> just how German the internals really are.
>>
>> Those interested in slightly customizing knoppix should check out 
>> this URL for knoppix-customize:
>> http://hydra.hq.linuxtag.net/~kester/knoppix-customize/
>>
>> More pointers can be found there on how to do the entire remastering 
>> process as well.
>>
>> Aaron J.
>
>
> Hey, if we're customizing a knoppix distribution then perhaps we
> should think of other things to do like adding a TriLUG logo to
> it (hmm... perhaps we should get one first...), making the default
> web page be the trilug web page, etc...  After all, we're getting
> these out there mainly as a promotional tool for linux, but to a lesser
> extent for the LUG itself.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Cheers,
> Tanner