[gobolinux-users] Idea for Gobolinux binary distribution

[Jonas Karlsson]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:55:53 +0200, Rayne Van-Dunem  
<raynenamibia at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

We don't have to bother with databases updates or anything. Just drop the  
third party app into an appropriate subfolder in /Programs and run  
SymlinkProgram on it and voila!

>
> 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).
>
I can see a point here, but I do think it's necessary to have some sort of  
support in the host os for this.
An easy way of doing this on *nix is to modify the $PATH variable to  
include the requested app on the mounted USB device.
But otoh maybe you are refering to booting the computer with GoboLinux  
 from an USB device and then run apps, not included in the live ISO, from  
the same. I can see a solution to this as well, after having done some  
searches. One could use FunionFS (a FUSE union mount app) to unionmount a  
GoboPackage on /Programs using archivemount (a FUSE mod to mount archives,  
such as tar.bz2), where it would run as native. I don't know what speed  
penalties that would create, having a mounted archive from an USB device.

> 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*.
>
As I said above...

-- 
/Jonas

Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/