[Live-demo] OSGeoLive 6.5 Pre-release checkin

[Hamish]

> Alex wrote:
> FYI, I just completed a test run of the full iso build
> based on r10k.
> It's a little large at ~5 GB. I'll look over the
> installer selection tomorrow and adjust. Script
> appears to be working fine and all download links succeeded.

the current full installer can't change things in the base
iso, so the removal of the index.html placeholders for mac
and Windows installers fails, and you still get pointed to
the "you need the full iso" page when you click the links on
the main help page.


Some more numbers to chew on:
By hacking the Startup Disk Creator python code I found that
we could have persistent storage on a 4gb usb stick, but only
83mb maximum. Previously I'd set the min space level at 256mb
and I think that's about right. Upon first boot instantly about
130mb is used (using 6.0 iso as a test), so with the 83mb left
it filled the usb drive and while it booted to the desktop, the
first time you tried to start firefox etc you got disk full
errors. So if we want persistence on 4gb usb drives we need to
claw back ~ 175mb from the base ISO. It's within our reach but
probably too invasive for the current release. Looking at newegg
there are still plenty of 4gb drives for sale (even 2gb ones)
but thankfully the 8gb ones are only 50c or $1 more.

With the regular non-persistent mini iso installed there was
about 134mb free on the fat32 filesystem, so from another
computer I could mount the usb drive and add a new folder with
my wifi firmware in it, to install by hand after each boot.
That didn't really work (wanted headers, debhelper, ...) but
maybe I'll find the right combo when attached to a hardwired
internet connection to get the minimum pkg set figured out.

Starting geoserver on my old & slow Atom netbook I saw the
same trouble with the user not belonging to the 'users' or
'www-data' groups. It's a race condition at boot time, the
auto-login launches before rc.local has finished, and rc.local
is what adds the user to those groups. It's weird though as
all the other groups (audio, ..) are present. The only thing
to be done is to log out and log back in, or start from a
Terminal prompt and start a new login with 'su - user' then
launch from there. Launching the startups as root doesn't help
since then root owns ~/.mozilla etc. and you get locked out.
If anything is done about it, the welcome message needs updating.
Changing the auto-login sequence is a bit of a pain, IIRC, but
worth looking into. I guess someone decided speed to the desktop
was more important than having a working system at bootup... now
what other OS does that remind me of..?


Hamish