[gobolinux-users] Idea for Gobolinux binary distribution

[Michael Homer]

On 10/19/06, 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.
Gentoo has basically no third-party support whatsoever. It's nearly
impossible to install something that isn't in Portage without using an
overlay and/or writing the ebuild yourself, and that's actually more
complicated than adding a repository or writing a local recipe. Binary
packages are basically out of the question for Gentoo. Fortunately,
nearly everything is in Portage (my tree currently has 11,548
programs, according to echo $((`ls -1 *-* | wc -l`-`ls -1d *-*|wc
-l`*2)), so it's rare there's something I want that isn't there).
Writing something specifically for Gentoo is no easier nor harder than
for any other distribution.

Installing Gentoo from scratch isn't difficult, although I'd recommend
doing it from inside another distribution (I use an Ubuntu livecd and
chroot in) so you have something to do while it's going..

> 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).
But you have installed it; it is on the hard drive. You've just
created another level of abstraction. There's no difference between
that and InstallPackage / RemoveProgram. In fact, using FUSE or its
ilk you could mount a tarball, or an ISO just using isofs, in
/Programs/Foo and SymlinkProgram it (or, as Jonas said, `export
PATH="/Programs/Foo/1.0:$PATH"`).

USB portable applications are useful for the ability to plug it in and
have your plugins, bookmarks, history, etc right there in front of
you, but that's not included in your proposal that involves trashing
it when you're done and not actually being pocketable.

> 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* .
You can do that already. It would be pretty pointless, since, as I
said, `InstallPackage Foo--1.0--i686.tar.bz2` and `RemoveProgram Foo
&& rm -rf /Programs/Foo` do exactly what you want, but mounting the
tarball using one of the userspace filesystem drivers and
SymlinkProgramming it would match exactly.

> Both Apple and Microsoft have apps which allow for harddisk/CD/DVD drive
> emulation; Apple, with its DiskImageMounter utility for Mac OS X, supports
> it natively, and disk images (.dmg) are used to transfer and "mount" OS X
> apps.
In the *nix world, this is called "mount". You can mount tarballs with
FUSE and others, you can mount ISOs with a vanilla setup, you can
mount a filesystem contained in a file. The only reason not to
distribute things this way is that there's not a lot of point to it.
And Gobo, unlike others, installs everything into its own directory,
so you have all the advantages and none of the drawbacks.

> 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.
I suspect they do it much the same way. dmgs are basically what you'd
get from `cat /dev/cdrom > file.dmg` (in principle, there are actually
complications to allow for the clever multiplicity they allow).

I really don't see any point in this; it's already covered by the Gobo
setup. You could if you wanted write a couple of wrapper scripts to
hide the internals, but they'd only be a couple of lines.
-Michael