Hello,



As I mentioned a couple days ago, in addition to having contributed to 

Fedora's livecd-toos, I also maintain VirOS.  It is my independent 

though rough functional equivalent to Fedora's livecd-tools.  Unlike 

livecd-tools, it doesn't require root privs, but is 5x slower, and also 

supports my alternate installer- zyx-liveinstaller.  zyx-liveinstaller 

is a simple demo installer, centered around a simple rebootless 

installation.  What this means is that you can boot the traditional 

live-cd/usb, go to a terminal(or use the gui), and type



# note this is a DESTRUCTIVE install, destination partitions get wiped

zyx-liveinstaller-cli /dev/sdx1 /dev/sdx2 /dev/sdx3 &



and then go about your business already interacting with a full 'live' 

OS and as soon as that command finishes in the background, doing a df -h 

will show you that you are no longer running from the copy-on-write 

'live' rootfs, but instead already installed and running on /dev/sdx. 

Add something like the promise of ksplice kernel updates, and you get a 

system whose operational lifecycle never technically needs a single reboot.



Anyway, long story short, as promised, here is the first alpha release 

of a livecd/usb .iso descended from el6, presently Scientific Linux's 

available 6rolling repos.



It is a development release, and rather than colorful metaphors I'll 

just throw in the relevent GPL quote[1] as an appendix and WARNING.



http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/xzyx/



the VirOS iso generating tools are now hosted at



http://viros.sourceforge.net

[log in to unmask]



Keep in mind this is just a 'release early / release often' initial 

release.  But it will get you started, and if you are lucky work as 

advertised.  It also has anaconda for traditional network installs 

instead of zyx-liveinstaller, and may yet one day support the 

traditional anaconda style rebootful liveos installs as a 3rd option. 

And a full desktop, openoffice, thunderbird, emacs,...  coming soon, NDS 

homebrew devkit and rakarrack audio-fx additions.



So let me know if you find any of this interesting, and in particular if 

you have problems or even success with this release of 'X-ZyX'.  This 

will be the last similar announcement to this list.  I had thought this 

bleeding edge .iso would be useful in the absence of an official 

alternative, but it appears Urs Beyerle managed to fill the el6-liveos 

void with the pre-alpha SL livecd just a couple hours before 

x-zyx-0.6.0.0.iso started uploading to my hosting provider(it still has 

a few hours left with my slow 'broadband' upstream).  Still, a second 

alternative .iso may prove useful and interesting to some.  Finally, I 

do plan on submitting a spec for viros here for inclusion in the contrib 

repository.  Until then-



Thanks for Scientific Linux, Happy Holidays, and Cheers,



-dmc

Douglas McClendon

http://cloudsession.com





[1]

---



11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY 

FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN 

OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES 

PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER 

EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED 

WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE 

ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH 

YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL 

NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

"