Re: Arabbix's which distro to work with

[Alaa Abd El Fattah <alaa at eglug dot org>]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:05:02 -0800 (PST)
Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote:

> 
> Can't we do the same say if we for instance opted for ubuntu
> (ie. use debian's installer (d-i)) ?  What would we be loosing
> if we decided to go this route as you didn't seem to list it as
> an option.
> 
> Unless I'm missing something, if we opted to base it on something
> that was formerly based on morphix but now has moved on to debian's
> installer we would still get the modularity and a more active
> development community, no ?

no the new ubuntu design is not modular at all, they drifted away from
the morphix base completely.


the main problem with ubuntu is that it is not ready yet, according to
the developers it will take at least 6 weeks to mature and stabilize
enough (at the moment there is no X11 hardware detection for instance).

however the new ubuntu design does not provide any advantages for us,
the design is geared towards minimizing the work done on the livecd
that does not benefit the installable distro, so they have no special
scripts for anything, just a make file that goes and apt-gets everything
needed.

at the moment there are two weaknesses I can see in the design (from our
perspective not from theirs):

there is no way yet to modify an existing ISO, each small change
requires you completely rebuild the distro.

remastering is not considered something you'll want to do, so there is
no support or documentation for how to do it, it is not impossible off
course (in the end you can just unpack the iso modify files and put it
back in a new iso) but still I'd be more comfortable doing something a
hundred other people are doing with me (again this minimizes work, I'm
lazy remember).

since you are not supposed to remaster every customization should go
through apt-get which means if you need to modify a file from some core
ubuntu package you'll need to rebuild that package (again there are ways
around this, but I don't like it).

and if you need to modify the hardware detection code (to support
winmodems for instance) your work has to go in the debian-installer code
base which is not as easy as modifying a bunch of scripts (bardo not
really a rule it can't be hacked around).

anyways, this does not discard ubuntu at all, as I said option 2 was to
modify an existing livecd and option 3 was to build from a mainstream
distro install we can chose ubuntu live cd or proper distro if we choose
these two options, I just see no particular merit in it.

cheers,
Alaa
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ultimate_answer_t deep_thought(void) {
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}