[Sugar-devel] Live CD with network / HDD storage - possible?

[James Cameron]

The method myself and a team of others used week before last at a
holiday camp was to take a current Knoppix Live CD, extract the
compressed loopback filesystem, and then use the standard Debian tools
to install a desktop package of our choice.  We could have installed the
sugar-desktop package if we needed it, but our participants had
needs that were not met by Sugar.

The camp was run at a state high school in Queensland, Australia.  There
were many (~90) modern desktop computers in the commerce classrooms, but
we were not permitted to use the Microsoft Windows environment on each.
We had to avoid touching the hard drives.

We set up two servers that would PXE boot the classroom computers.  One
server was held in reserve in case the other failed.  We used two
different methods; one was a CentOS 5.3 system booted from a RAID array,
the other was a Knoppix system booted from a USB flash drive.  These
servers were configured to respond to the PXE boot requests from the
classroom computers, provide a kernel over TFTP, then provide the
filesystem over NFS.

The remastered filesystem contained everything we thought our
participants would need.  Several times during the week we modified this
filesystem to add further features.

Booting time was about one minute, if I recall correctly.

I've not done the same with Sugar yet, but it should be quite possible.

You might like to look at LTSP and the "server" packages.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/