Live CD

Subversion
The live CD build script is developed in this Subversion repository,

 Browse, http://artefactual.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/?root=livecd Checkout,

$ svn co http://artefactual.com/svn/livecd 

Downloads
See ica-atom:Download demo CD for pre built ISOs

Version updates before build

 * When a new version of ICA-AtoM is released, scripts/fixtures/staticPages.yml must be updated

Script
The Makefile builds a live CD ISO from the most current Ubuntu packages and project source code

Consider installing apt-proxy, to speed up the process

Use this command to build a live CD ISO,

$ make

Alternatively, you can override some of the variables in the script as follows,

$ make SUITE=intrepid

Use
You can use the ISO by either burning to CD and booting on a spare machine, or booting on a virtual machine. This will boot up into the default Ubuntu desktop. From there open Firefox and navigate to http://localhost/, where you can begin to use ICA-AtoM.

QEMU
This has been tested with ssh and the -X flag (x11 forwarding)

QEMU is another option, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomization#Testing%20the%20CD

$ qemu -cdrom hardy-chroot/home/remastersys/remastersys/customdist.iso -boot d -m 256

KVM
For KVM you must have adequate hardware support

How to install KVM on Debian

Use this command to boot the live CD from the command line,

$ kvm -cdrom /path/to/icaatom.iso -boot d -m 500

Ubiquity/Casper
Ubuntu live CDs do not contain a user or home directory. These are created when the CD is booted. Consequently we don't ship Qubit in a /home/{username}/public_html directory. Alternatively, we could add the steps to configure Qubit to the script which creates a live CD user. This is a little more complicated, but could have advantages, like not shipping the sample data both in YAML format and in the database.

Debconf
The version of MySQL in Hardy appears not to respect the mysql-server/root_password debconf option. The version in Intrepid appears to work non-interactively, even without this debconf configuration.

The live CD build process is also interrupted by a prompt for the "password for root on localhost". The prompt appears around the time cups-pdf is installed. Not sure why this prompt appears, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=565407

apt-proxy
apt-proxy maintains a cache of packages, saving you from downloading hundreds of megabytes every time you build an ISO

The build script is configured to use apt-proxy, or a package repository on localhost, by default. Something to consider might be changing the default to use Canonical's package repository and deliberately overriding it when you want to use apt-proxy, or adjusting the hosts configuration on machines where apt-proxy is installed, to point archive.ubuntu.com at localhost?

Offline
localhost is not accessible in offline mode. The first time you start Firefox without a network connection, it is not in offline mode, but if you quit Firefox and start again, it will be in offline mode. This is fixed in issue 423 by deleting the extensions.cache file before running Firefox. This way, essentially every time you start Firefox is like the first time. This is implemented in /usr/bin/runica.sh on the live CD.

cdimage
Need package bzr to checkout Ubuntu cdimage scripts

$ bzr get http://people.ubuntu.com/~cjwatson/bzr/cdimage/mainline

build-image-set calls lockfile, which comes in package procmail?

anonftpsync calls rsync, which is a dependency of ubuntu-standard

rsync running now for more than twelve hours. The cdimage scripts appear quite heavy weight?

CDIMAGE_ROOT must be absolute path?

TODO

 * Consider switching from remastersys to Ubuntu's live CD build scripts, http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ubuntu.devel/26858

Steps

 * New repository for Memory BC live CD
 * New branch of Qubit for Memory BC branded version
 * Make changes to sampleData.yml to enable custom brand
 * A few changes to Memory BC live CD Makefile to use new repository