[Gnumed-devel] Re: Distro Q

[Andreas Tille]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Horst Herb wrote:

> I don't think there is a single good reason *not* to use Debian except for the
> admittedly very poor installer & hardware detection. However, this has been
> overcome by Knoppix and the likes. I reckon Debian developers should just
> take any of the stripped-down basic Knoppix derivates and bolt a fool-proof
> hard disk install script on top of it.
A new debian-installer is in heavy development and the next release (Sarge)
will ship with this by default.  You know want to know when Sarge will be
released.  The canonical answer applies here: When it is ready.  (I personally
do not expect it this year - but this is a *personal* opinion.)

Regarding to Knoppix: On LinuxTag Chemnitz I had the idea that we could
adopt the debootstrap package (which builds a Debian chroot environment)
for bootstrapping customized Knoppix CDs.  Klaus Knopper liked the idea

I'm currently trying to derive a "knopootstrap" from debootstrap and will
discuss the issue on debian-knoppix.  The idea is as follows:

  1. Make knopootstrap an official Debian package. So everybody running
     Debian could easily create Knoppix CDs.

  2. knopootstrap should install a base system and install some
     Knoppix specific debs into it.  These Knoppix specific debs should
     be hosted on a Knoppix mirror and should be included in the
        /etc/apt/sources.list
     for an easy update.  For sure these packages should be installed
     in the knopootstrap process.
     These Knoppix specific packages should contain all Knoppix specific
     stuff including the right dependencies.
     Perhaps some meta packages would make sense:

        knoppix-base:  Just the base system without X
        knoppix-x:     All stuff necessary to run an X session
        knoppix-kde:   All stuff necessary to run KDE
        knoppix-gnome: All stuff necessary to run Gnome

     For the sake of limited space on a CD a knoppix-kde might conflict
     to knoppix-gnome.

  3. Install your personal packages which you want to put onto the Knoppix CD
     via

           apt-get install <my packages>

  4. Build Knoppix ISO via a toll which should be provided by knopootstrap.

In my opinion this would make our live to create GnuMed (or Debian-Med or
whatever) life CDs much more easy.

Expect this mail on the debian-knoppix list soon.

Kind regards

         Andreas.