[TriLUG] custom knoppix

[Aaron S. Joyner]

gregbrown at mindspring.com wrote:

>Has anyone created a custom knoppix ISO?
>
Yes, lots of people have!   :)  I happen to be one of them.

>I read the how-to webpage some time ago, but I am curious what anyone's actual experiences were.
>
In brief, it's a long process that takes a good bit of cpu cycles, and a 
fair chunk of disk space.  The HOWTOs are quite straight forward, and 
the process really isn't all that difficult, it's just time / space 
consuming.  Of course, you have to know enough about how a distro is 
built, and read up on using their package management so that you can 
easily add / remove packages from the extracted Knoppix system, in order 
to really effect any major changes.  All the package management details 
are covered in the various Knoppix-remastering HOWTOs.

>I would like to create a Knoppix that boots and automatically launches Firefox (already configured with as many plug-ins as possible) and that's ALL I want on the ISO.
>  
>
Fortunately, what you want isn't terribly hard.  You'll just need to 
know a bit about configuring X start up applications, which is an easy 
google.  Pay attention to the desktop environment, KDE in the case of 
Knoppix.  Also you should make sure you start with a relatively recent 
Knoppix, as that will save you from having to add in the latest Firefox.

>The idea is I can send a CD to my parents (maybe even a mini-cd?) that they can pop into their home PC, boot up, and proceed to join the world of on-line eCommerce.  They use M$, and steadfastly refuse to move off that platform for their daily use, but I have finally installed enough fear into them that they want an alternative when purchasing items on-line.
>
Great work!  Any angle you can use to pry the door open for FOSS is a 
good thing.  Just be careful not to steer too far in the wrong direction 
that you end up in the FUD department.  Honesty in all things.

>Other then a Linux laptop, which is too expensive, the only other alternative I could come up with was Knoppix, which is too technically complicated for them in it's stock form (if it's not simple and doesn't work easily the first time they won't use it).  
>  
>
Jon Mitchell's suggestion of Puppy isn't a bad idea.  I'm not personally 
that familiar with it, but it sounds like it might be a much simpler 
approach to get the same end result.  And you can probably do it on a 
wallet-sized CD, such that your parents could then take that image with 
them where ever they go, and always have an increased feeling of 
security by avoiding untrusted software where possible.  Of course, 
don't forget that you're not avoiding untrusted hardware.

>So, in the end, absolute nirvana would be the following:
>
>1. boot knoppix with iptables running and blocking ALL inbound traffic with SYN flag 
>2. knoppix boots and brings up Knoppix -> the home page has a big button that says "REBOOT"
>3. parents could merrily surf away and, when done, click the "home" icon
>4. start page comes back up with the "REBOOT" button
>5. parents click REBOOT button which runs "init 6" in the background
>6. PC barfs out the Knoppix CD, parents rejoin the M$ world
>
>Is the "REBOOT" button possible?  Does something like this already exist?
>  
>
Matt Pusateri's suggestion of a desktop icon for your Reboot button is 
probably ideal.  At first I was thinking you could just do something 
like <a href=file:///usr/bin/reboot>, but allowing that type of behavior 
is part of what you're trying to get away from in IE.  :) 

Anyway, I believe Knoppix does have Apache installed out of the box, and 
if it doesn't, you can quite easily add it during a remaster.  That will 
give you the ability (albeit with the small but quite unnecessary 
overhead of having Apache running all the time) to execute CGI scripts, 
so that you can use a setuid script to reboot the machine.  Setuid 
scripts can be, in-and-of themselves, a whole new can of worms to open; 
generally the system will try to prevent you from doing precisely that.  
But it's not too hard to work with in the framework and get the results 
you want.  Me, I'd suggest the desktop icon too.  :)

Best of luck in your remastering efforts!

Aaron S. Joyner