[Typo3-dev] TYPO3 on a Knoppix CD?

[Christoph Moeller]

Hi guys,

>>>As Christoph Thiel said, it shouldn't be Knoppix because it's blown up
>>>stupidly and isn't really a clean sarge oder sid (dirty mixed).

True, indeed. I did a rough Knoppix-TYPO3 prototype a couple of months 
ago and it was a PITA to throw out the lots of unneeded packages. Still 
have the VMware images on disk. Due to time limitation it only grew to a 
"boot->DHCP->start Mozilla->display an overview page" state. The start 
page contains some information gathered by a tiny PHP script, such as 
status of network connection, current IP address/URL of the new T3 box 
for remote testing in IE, plus links to different T3 local test sites.
Besides being really time-consuming, this was rather easy. The hard part 
will be the "grips" of it, i.e. general look, audience specificness, 
stability, manageability and useability. See below...

>>Since we would only need a web browser as gui to operate TYPO3 any other 
>>window manager with a smaller footprint than gnome or kde should do.
> Something like morphix (http://www.morphix.org/), LNX-BBC
> (http://www.lnx-bbc.org/) or Damn Small Linux
> (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) could be a good starting point. 

Really fine projects - but we'll have to focus on several aspects:

a) customer friendly impression upon the first look:
This is a great marketing/giveaway tool. You don't sell geeky stuff 
that's got incredibly cool internals in the first place, but rather a 
product that runs well, looks good, "feels" like Windows, and doesn't 
distract people from the product, itself. I'd therefore vote for some 
W32-lookalike WM, perhaps icewm with an XP theme? [Don't get me wrong 
here, that's the way it is, sadly... ;-P]
Of course, in combination with c) there's enough room for other target 
audiences.

b) small size on CD:
"Business card CD" and has to be downloadable (traffic is expensive).

c) good maintainability:
Some kind of a defined build-root for mastering new ISOs needs to be in 
place. We'll have to pick a well-structured distro in order to be able 
to get new versions and customizations up and running in no time.
That would of course leave us some more room to prepare different target 
TYPO3-on-CD editions such as "really small footprint", 
"full-blown-tradefair-presentation", or even "USB stick HD instant CMS".

d) kick-ass design:
Depending on the intended use and audience. Could be done by agencies, 
themselves, if the build process is well documented. We'll still have to 
do some official CD release design and contents for the public version.

Anyway, count Andre and myself in.

Cheers,
Chris