Submitted by “Imagine a customized GNU/Linux distribution, built to your specifications with a minimal amount of effort on your part. If you are running Fedora 7, that dream is now a reality, thanks to Revisor, a graphical interface for building custom install images for Fedora. Taking the shape of a GNOME wizard, Revisor comes close to being an ideal desktop tool. Inexperienced users can use its default settings without much knowledge of what is happening behind the scenes, while more expert users can customize each aspect of producing an .ISO.”
This ability to create an easy custom spin of Fedora has all kind of interesting options. Say you want a slim system and you just want XFCE, the latest kernel, Compiz and development tools. You could add in all the proprietary MP3, mpeg, realplayer, flash media applications plus nvidia drivers and then bundle it up as an ISO file on a key chain drive. Makes it easy to say try this version of Fedora it is fully loaded. Interesting possibilities here blending your own flavor of a Linux desktop. One would have to be careful about redistributing the blended ISO in the U.S. since the proprietary drivers could create licensing problems.
Edited 2007-06-09 02:43
this is a phenomenal feature for many reasons. more and more distros are offering remastering capabilities, hopefully ubuntu will jump on the bandwagon
hopefully ubuntu will jump on the bandwagon
Wait a second you mean Fedora is ahead of the all-popular Ubuntu in technology! This can’t be true. I thought Ubuntu had it all. I feel so unpopular now that I might have to switch back to Fedora to claim I am using number 1. (sarcasm).
haha, I love it!
Ehh, hmmmm, I, hate to a, rain on the ol’sarcasm train with throwing a little infos around . . . but I will. This has indeed been available for Ubuntu for quite some time. http://uck.sourceforge.net/.
The difference lies whether upstream/core ubuntu development team supports it _officially_ or not.
All the goodies RH is introducing to fedora is indeed making fedora improving at high speeds. As many have seen in the release notes of F7, the big highlights are:
* Fedora Directory Server
* Mugshot
* Liberation fonts
* revisor
* a more quicker yum
* …
Better Xorg configuration too? I know it detects my display properly.
I think Ubuntu still uses older methods.
Fedora 7 is using Xorg 7.3 afaik, which wasn’t ready for the last Ubuntu release but will e in the next. It features improved hardware detection.
Also, don’t forget the improvements to the GUI for easy virtualization. I am pretty happy with 7 right now. It has some bugs to iron out with the new harddrive stack. Once codecbuddy finds its way into version 8 and multimedia codecs can be added via a GUI prompt I think a lot of new users will find it more accommodating.
The live CD creation tools packaged for F7 are in my opinion one of the major new features in this release and for my work the most important one.
This being said, I want to acknowledge that it is still far from easy to create a customized live system. I you want to be able to roll your own, you need to know a lot about Fedora Linux, administration, about rpm dependencies and about bash scripting. And you need some nerdy lust for repeated experiments and thourough testing
The linked article is interesting – still it only touches the surface of the live CD package. For those who want to delve into this I recommend the (not yet complete) documents at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/LiveCDHowTo and http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fedora-livecd…
Also, it is advisable to maintain your on repositories on the network/localhost and to build your own RPMs instead of using the Kickstart-like template files for all changes that need to be applied to the customized live system.
A weekend is nothing. prepare for a week with dark circles around your eyes. Anyway, I already like the modest results I had with F7 better, than what we were able to do with the nevertheless amazing Knoppix toolkit.