I'm toying with the idea of building a FreeBSD-based Live CD, based loosely on FreeSBIE, TinyBSD, and NanoBSD.
Goals are:
Minimal .iso size, hopefully around 64MB
Slimmed-down, .gz'd kernel
.gz'd world executables
xorg vesa or fb driver - not worrying about hardware acceleration
These goals aren't unique - most liveCD's have these.
Non-unique goals are:
Dynamic third-party software installation.
- If you have a writable media attached to the maching, i.e., a USB stick, you can choose packages of options to install.
- The CD Media doesn't change, but the installed app is overlaid (Merged) onto the read-only image from the CD, allowing the new app to be available.
- Updates to package disk images are done via rsync to a central server - file delta's only
- Might build several versions of the .iso's:
- CafeBSD: Internet Cafe, Firefox, Filezilla, acroread, flash player, openoffice
- HelixBSD: Running Apache, PHP, FirebirdSQL, and my accounting system, HelixGL
More info at
http://prism9.com/ - MediaBSD: Media center based on Freevo or similar
- HealthBSD: Dunno. Barking mad I reckon, building a pharmacy/hospital system...
Anyhoo, grabbed a copy of VirtualBox from Sun, and busy syncing a FreeBSD CVS Mirror for local building.
Created a few VM's - one without a HDD for diskless boot testing, and another with a small HDD for 3rd party app creation.
Todo:
- Get a full XORG desktop built, and make sure everything works
- Build a .pkg file to .img (disk image) converter for merging with a live filesystem
- Build a disk image distribution system for 3rd party apps, with rsync'able files for fast updates
- ...
- Profit! ;)