Re: BDI candidate...

[rehenry-at-up.net]

Hi Chris

Yes there has been some playing with Knoppix with an eye to the BDI.  I've got an experimental CD that NIST worked on for an rcslib and real-time demo.  (Thanks Will)  I spent the time to modify it and get it running the EMC to where I was reasonably happy with it.  Very slow boot and a number of critical modules missing for things like audio, networking, and such.  And at best it is one stubborn B&**%# to make changes to.  I've seen old mules that were easier to change and I tried every site I could find on editing the Knoppix disk.

The number of packages that Knopper has been able to squeeze into that compressed img is astounding.  It would take hours to go through and remove the unnecessary stuff to make a quick loading machine control.  KDE 3 is very nice.  I had not seen it before.  But it adds a good deal to the startup time so I switched the default to twm and the load took about half the time.  Twm is much less user friendly.  That counts a lot when you're thinking of making a boot from CD so that complete newbies can try out the EMC without the trouble of an install!  They're thinking slick and slick it ain't.  I also made a version that skipped everything to do with install and went directly to a full screen mini gui.  

I also had to move the EMC's writable files, ini, var, tbl in order to make them changable during a run.  In the pre version there is no way to even change a tool size and have it run.  I made links to files by those names that were setup in the ramdisk but the real solution would be to have the startup routine poll the available hard drives and find one that could stand a /emc or \emc directory with programs and these variable files in it.  Then the problem is pointing the EMC to it during a run.  

If one had a single purpose device that you wanted to make a Knoppix-EMC for it might be a useful tool.  I have not been able to sell it that way even.  I guess that I've gotten so used to a <10 minute install of the BDI-2.18 and all of the configurability that comes with it that I'm a bit spoiled.

Take all of this FIFW as M2CW.

Ray


On Fri, 28 Mar 2003 16:34:09 -0500 (EST), emc-at-nist.gov said:
>
>> eep! .. debian .. err deviant as it is known. 
>
>Very odd.  I've had the exact opposite experience with Debian.  The
>package management is so perfect it hurts.  A simple apt-get update &&
>apt-get upgrade and your machine is up to date.  Very strange that you
>would have so much trouble.  I've never once had a dependency issue,
>ever.  It has always grabbed everything I needed and configured it well
>enough to run or asked me what to do.  No other linux distro has a
>package manager that even comes close, IMHO.  I install apt-rpm on all
>my redhat machines so I can actually install software without having to
>download every single dependency individually.
>
>I've also been a linux/unix sysadmin for many years and now run debian
>on all my servers and a mix of debian/redhat on my workstations.
>
>Has anyone looked at knoppix or other CD based distros?  I've seen some
>custom work done to make them install to the drive so they could work
>well as a BDI.  Knoppix is debian based, last I checked.
>
>Now theres a thing ... a 
>> distribution that is no doubt stable, but comes with almost *nothing* 
>> configured as standard. its package management sucks bigtime. dependencies 
>> are a nightmare, I spent a week trying to install the standard set of DJB 
>> tools (qmail/vpopmail/tcpserver etc) and gave up .. and its installer is not 
>> nice. I know once you get it set up is is stable, but getting there is non 
>> trivial. it is all too easy to get the package management into a real mess on 
>> debian ... I managed it several times without even trying (circular 
>> dependencies, conflicts etc)
>> 
>> I've been doing sys admin on Linux systems for a variety of clients for 3 
>> years now, and debian wasted several weeks of my life in frutiless search of 
>> trying to get even a basic system going. Say what you will, but Redhat at 
>> least installs out of the box (the debian (potato) installer plain refused on 
>> 2 out of 3 machines I tried) and is fairly stable once up and running. 
>
>I'll admit the installer is a bit wonky and if you're looking for
>stability you have to run the stable branch.  They do have a graphical
>installer now which will probably make it into the next major release.
>
>Anyhow, I'm not trying to start a war or anything.  I've just had such a
>polar opposite experience with debian that I had to reply.
>
>Chris
>
>
>
>