Forum OpenACS Q&A: Knoppix Boot CD

1: Knoppix Boot CD

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/21/03 03:21 PM

As some of you might already know, we have build a Knoppix CD and are on the brink of building a second one hosting http://dotlrn.goteti.net as the basic for the demoing content. Take a look at the research package that Denis Roy has been building for this project. It should be a valuable addition to dotLRN 2.0.

Now, back to the Knoppix CD topic. As it is quite hard to make a Knoppix CD hosting OpenACS we are willing of offering this as a service to the community. We will build a Knoppix CD with no data included that allows fast installation of OpenACS, as well as one with some data (if we get it).

What we need for the second CD is some data (quite boring to put the content on it all on our own, especially as the above mentioned demo CD will be in German...). So if you have some, please don't hesitate to share it (maybe the demo server ??).

The images will be uploaded as ISO files and made available through http://www.sussdorff-roy.com in due time.

Now some questions:

- Which version of dotLRN shall we use for the first set of CD's ?
- How many people would be interested in getting their hand on these CD's ?
- Who would be interested in getting a customized version of the CD for their marketing purposes (so without the Logo and link to sussdorff-roy.com, but you organization's one and, if wanted, additional different content) ?

Timeframe for this is roughly two to three weeks at the current speed of development in the various areas.

2: Re: Knoppix Boot CD (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 09/22/03 04:27 PM

Malte, I personally don't have any real need for an OpenACS Knoppix boot CD at all, but it is cool enough that I would want to burn a few just to try it and have available to hand out to friends and acquaintances! (Sorry, no demo data for you.)

How does this Knoppix install work exactly? E.g., it needs to write to a hard disk at least for the PostgreSQL database, right, so how/where does it do that? Is this Knoppix install adequate for setting up a Production OpenACS instance too, or is it strictly for quick demos and the like? And why?

3: Re: Knoppix Boot CD (response to 2)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 09/22/03 04:53 PM

(Haven't see Malte's Knoppix CD yet...)

You can write to a ram disk. I guess that's what PostgreSQL is doing there. You can install your Knoppix boot system to your harddrive, however that because Knoppix still is a mixture of Debian and RedHat it is usually not recommended.

4: Re: Knoppix Boot CD (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/22/03 05:26 PM

Hi Andrew, the description Dirk gave is accurate. We use a RAM disk to copy the Postgres Database to and start it from there.

If you want to run OpenACS from your harddisk, you should just copy the pgsql files from the disk over to your harddisk as well as any AOLserver and /web/ directories. But yeah, valid point, we should document this as well (and maybe even provide one command to copy it from the CD to the harddisk, if this is available). Need to check it out.