Freeduc-CD factory
From OFSET Wiki
As OFSET's developers gained some experience from finely polishing gnuLinux distributions for the education, they have output some packages which make easier the process of publication of a new live-cd.
You can find more than one tutorial about customisation of a live-cd around the web. Freeduc-CD factory is not such a tutorial, it is rather a collaborative environment allowing several people to interact before the publication and during it.
There are roughly three departments in this "factory" :
Contents |
[edit] The menu & profile departement
There you can edit metadata about a set of top-level applications, in many languages. These metadata are:
| Metadata | a short description for humans | a longer information about the features | the list of necessary packages | the eventually existing examples | a link to a documentation chapter, part of the project Freeduc-Doc | an icon | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Example |
| abiword, ingerman (de), iamerican(en), ifrench-gut(fr), iitalian(it) | abiword.tex | 
| ||||||||||||
Then applications are gathered in categories, and all of these are used to make interactively a tree of menus, part of a profile. Here is a snapshot of the developer interface used to make a profile (icons can be added, moved, erased on the fly):
The web-based developer interface is provided by the package freeduc-dbase, hosted at gna.org. It features exporting useful configuration files for Xfce4, WindowMaker and KDE.
[edit] The documentation department
This part of the project is hosted at gna.org (project Freeduc-documentation)
It is a collection of documents written each for an educational application, giving hints for its usage in the classroom, with examples, screenshots, or even a short tutorial. These documents are structured with no more than two levels of subsections, because they are supposed to be integrated into Freeduc-book, which has two levels of structure more : the category and the application levels.
The source documents can be submitted either in OpenDocument or in LaTeX format. The process chain to output Freeduc-book in HTML and PDF format uses HyperLaTeX.
In order to be able to access well-formed OpenDocuments, we shall shortly use a validator, so the authors can see what their documents look like after processing.
[edit] The laboratory
The laboratory is the only part which requires some knowledge about the Debian internals. It is provided by the packages freeduc-build and freedu-doc, available in the debian repository [1].
The first one, freeduc-build, requires a root access to the development machine, it features the construction of a working ISO file, given a stripped-down live-CD and the export of a profile from the menu&profile department. Notice that freeduc-build can be used remotely : the working directory can be tested after its build process by connecting to a VNC session which is automatically launched. For example, Freeduc-ecole has been developed on a computer in Taipei (Taiwan), by a developer in France. The complete build process is done within approximately 20 minutes (machine work).
The second one, freedu-doc, features the compilation of Freeduc-book in several languages, given the list of languages, the profile to stick to, and a CVS access to gna.org. For example, the books for three languages and 40 top-level applications are output in approximately 10 minutes of computation. The HTML ouput is integrated into the help system of the live CD, bfore the compression stage.
[edit] Who can help?
Quite everybody can do a useful work at very high level in the two first departments: conception of the structure of the live-CD for a particular target, by shaping menus and making the profile, in the first department, and writing, translating, improving the documentation for individual applications in the second department.
The laboratory requires some knowledge about Debian, if you want to accept some bleeding-edge or recently packaged applications, which has been often the case for freeduc-CD distributions: sometimes you must uninstall, reinstall some packages, and less frequently recompile one of them to fit the existing environment. However most of the packages are installed without trouble from the main Debian repositories.
