[gobolinux-users] Idea for Gobolinux binary distribution

[Rayne Van-Dunem]

Better than Gentoo? Well, from a distance I can see the utterly messy
complexity that is involved in the building of a Gentoo system from scratch
(never got it to install properly on my HP Pavilion for some reason), and I
think that Gobo does a cleaner Portage-like installation process, but I
never thought of Gobo - which is not in the mainstream as much as Gentoo -
having better support for third-parties.

The virtual LiveCD idea is a result of having played with USB-portable apps
such as Firefox and VLC Player from portable-apps.org. It's where you can
run an app (usually open-source) from your USB thumb drive on any PC that
has Windows and at least one USB port, *without* having to *install* the app
on the PC's hard drive. This solution is especially useful in work (or
non-home) areas with available PCs (its also possible to run a Linux
distribution on a bootable USB thumb drive, rather than a LiveCD, with the
same capabilities).

OK. Now imagine if you could do the same thing on a Gobo box - run Gobo apps
from your thumb drive without hard drive installation - except that the
thumb drive is 1) Virtual and 2) Downloadable. In other words, *USB Drive
Emulation for portable applications*.

Both Apple and Microsoft have apps which allow for harddisk/CD/DVD drive
emulation; Apple, with its DiskImageMounter utility for Mac OS
X<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DiskImageMounter>,
supports it natively, and disk images (.dmg) are used to transfer and
"mount" OS X apps.

Now, I don't know if its a "hack" by Apple to hide whatever goes on in
Darwin (which is mostly hidden from the GUI view), but the same description
was used about the installation of Gobo apps and documents in specific,
human-readable folders when it was compared to a distinctly-similar approach
in OS X.

It was probably incorrect to use the LiveCD moniker to refer to this idea;
probably "virtual LiveUSB" would be better?

Rayne

On 10/17/06, Michael Homer <gobo-users-dufus at wotfun.com> wrote:
> I don't get how any of this is different to how Gobo packages work
> now. Mounting your "livecd" is `InstallPackage Foo<tab>`, trashing is
> `RemoveProgram Foo && rm -rf /Programs/Foo`. I may be misunderstanding
> you here, though.
>
> You said that if they "who are statedly not part of the overall
> distribution maintenance, can develop an application that works
> specifically for or with that distribution" then it looks better; I
> built Freshen this way, and it's very much tied to the Gobo system,
> obviously. That's a trivial example, but anything else could happen
> the same way.
>
> Gobo has much better third-party support than Gentoo; installing
> something that isn't in Portage is a substantial pain (you have to a)
> write an ebuild or b) find an overlay with it in it. Binaries are
> generally out.). An overlay would be basically the same as adding
> additional repositories for Recipes or packages.
>
> I have a strong feeling I'm missing something in what you said,
> though, I just can't put my finger on what.
> -Michael
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