[NTLUG:Discuss] Merry Christmas... Stuff their stockin with these!

[Steve Baker]

Chris Cox wrote:
> Many people are used to sharing the gift of Linux with their
> friends and relatives during the holidays.  Some of the
> favorite places for "create your own" CDs:

I've been following (and in a small way, helping) a group called
'The Games Based Linux Distro' who are trying to put together a live
CD containing a minimal Linux and a large collection of OpenSourced
games...plus (maybe) a browser and email client and a few other simple
tools:

     http://www.gbld.net

That team is failing through lack of momentum.  We were trying to
make a stripped-down Gentoo LiveCD that would autodetect and install
appropriate OpenGL drivers for reasonably modern ATI and nVidia cards
and have a Mesa fallback for others - and also to autodetect a sound
card.  Working with the network and with the host computer's hard drive
were not necessary - but obviously desirable if we're to include a browser
and email client.

That would have left about 350 to 400 Mbytes on the CD for games - and
we'd done extensive work to come up with a really good set of OpenSource
games (ie not 50 different versions of Tetris) and a workable plan for
making them easy to launch from a GUI.  All of the games we picked are
working well and we'd tested them carefully - eliminating the ones that
took a ton of valuable disk space or those that were too similar to
one-another - attempting to get a broad spectrum of game genres.

Anyway - the project is failing because of the effort in getting a
sufficiently cut down distro together using the expertise of a bunch
of games people who know far too little about the distro side of things.

So - does anyone know of a LiveCD starting point that has about half
the CD free but which has enough 'stuff' there to boot and load OpenGL
drivers?   If so then we'd have a great freebie CD to give to games
enthusiasts.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>    WorkEmail: <sjbaker at link.com>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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