Hi,
On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 09:57:12AM +0100, Alle Meije Wink wrote:
> Dear Micheal,
>
> That's brilliant. Sounds like a Debian/FSL live CD is not far off! Why
> would you run it on a VM though (instead of just straight from a CD on
> your computer -with 500M you even have room for some nice extra tools on
> a CD image, e.g. GIMP, tar, emacs, etc)? Must admit I'm not a VM fan...
I have noticed that ;)
> I guess that if you de-select everything in dselect [sorry] and then
> re-select gnuplot and tix, all your other programs will be in there
> automatically (thanks to Debian package management). That's the way I
> did it when making my cygwin `image' as well -was impressed by that!
>
> If you run it off a live CD you can also just mount your Windows drive.
IMHO the Live-CD approach has one major problem: you cannot update it
without having to download everything again. Looking at the changelog of
the Debian package I see at least 11 package updates due to upstream
changes since the release of 3.3 (therefore excluding packages updates
that simple fixes some Debian specific problems and also ignoring
security critical updates of the operating system). A Live-CD would
require people to download a new CD almost every month, assuming they
want to track FSL development closely.
If I further assume that a live CD image is 600 MB (compressed) and
let's say 200 win32 users (there are probably a lot more) that cannot
share Live-CDs. This would put an additional load 120+ GB per month on
the download server.
The VM approach would produce just a fraction of it.
Although you are right that you can simply mount the local drives from
within the Live system it should be just as convenient when using a VM.
The samba server needs to be configured only once in the VM master copy
and everybody automatically benefits from it.
I have to admit that I do not know much about Live-CD creation, but I
believe that they are just for demonstration purposes -- at least I do
not know anybody that uses such a system productively. But I may be
wrong.
As a next step I want to try VirtualBox instead of VMWare. I'd really
like to have a free software solution.
Cheers,
Michael
--
GPG key: 1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/hanke
ICQ: 48230050
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