Hi folks,

after some months of not not being able to work on and improve MCNLive I would like to announce officially my decision to stop with the development of MCNLive. The reasons are changes in my personal life, preferences about spending time.
Creating LiveCD's based on Mandriva and working on the mklivecd scripts kept me very busy the last 4 years. It has been a great experience, in particular working together with testers and contributors was wonderful.

MCNLive is the project of http://www.mandrivaclub.nl. And I hope you will find someone/people to take over from me and fill the gap. Help is really appreciated.

--chris

You're really quitting this time?

This is a huge misfortune for MCNL, the great amount of MCNLive users, and the other projects that depend on your mklivecd scripts (and I'm not only talking about FreevoLive).
Hope someone will take over...

Will you stay at MCNL anyway? Or will you be gone completely?


(Slightly off topic: Maybe you could upload your latest scripts to the testserver, so others can give it a try?)

I am very sorry to hear that, Chris. But there are more things in life that matter.
I hope you'll be fine and will be happy with the things you'll value the most.

Bye, Chris.

Dear Chris,

I'm very sad to hear you'r stopping with MCNLive, altough i can understand
I wanna thank you for all those beauty full releases you gave us in the last years.
World wide, MCNLive has become the best Linux live CD you can get!

Thanks Chris

Hi Chris,

Sorry to hear that you won't develop MCNLive anymore. I understand your reasons though. See you around the forum.

Dear Chris,

First of all, I am very sorry to hear you wont develop MCNLive anymore. Tough I have all respect for your reasons to get retired. I think I speak for all when I say: Good luck with your life, and we all hope to see you around.
You have been one of the driving forces of MCNL. Those of us who followed school will have learned that everybody is replaceable. Well, I think this is not true. At last, not this time. You aren't replace-able.
Thank you SO much for all your time, your dedication, and everything you've done for us, the MCNL members.

As said before, good luck with your life,
Best wishes, and love,
Jeroen

I'm not happy; but i'll respect the reason why but i hope you're still be a member of MCNL and respond on questions.

Kris, that's sad but this project is much work indeed. We are very grateful for all the hard work you put into this!

Now, how far have you gotten with getting the remaster script working for Mandriva 2008? Is there a possibility to try it out? Could you help us a bit in this transition process with you leaving the project? That would be great!

How much of a team is there without Kris? Any chance to continue?

Dear Kris,
Thanks for all the work you did.
I hope the changes are for the good and wish you the very best.
Beside making the live versions you where always ready to help people.
Hope to hear you one this forum and not completely lose contact.

With respect and friendly feelings
Rayke

Kris,

I'll respect your decision.
Hopefully we will still see you on the forum.

Sincerely
MauRice

Dear Chris,

Am feeling sad. Was waiting for your next masterpiece based om Mandirva 2008.

Like to thank you for your kind answers to all my questions in the past.

Wish to add that I fully respect your decision. Life is more than Linux or a LiveCD.

Wishing you all the best.

Georges.

Kris,

thanks for all your contributions, not only THE mandriva Live Cd but also on the forum.
Hope we keep seeing you on the forum.

My slogan: When you are living your life, we always remember your "Live!"

RvP

Kris is "the team"

Maybe we can setup a real developpment team with Chris as a temporary team leader ?

that darn LIFE always getting in the way.

i too find that without a happy medium something usually suffers a great deal.

i think you inspired a lot of folks and its a shame you cant get MDV to cut you a check since you did beat them to market

life love and happiness.

j

I think MCNLive should definitely continue, maybe in a downscaled form. At the very least we should have a working new mklivecd script that works with Mandriva 2008 so people can do a remaster. Maybe Chris can indicate how far she got with getting it to run on the new version and if she would be willing to provide at least some transitional support? For example, a few basic pointers on what to pay attention to when creating a new livecd...

So.......no more replies......? Is this the end of MCNLive? No one willing to do something?

If not anything else, I reckon we could have a team that could pursue a minimal MCNLive concept: keep developing the mklivecd script and test it on new Mandriva versions, and if someone feels like using it to creating a specific MCNLive distro then that's fine. But that way at least people can keep building Mandriva live systems. If we don't have an mklivecd that works with Mandriva 2008 then we have nothing at all. Now I am not saying that I have the necessary skills but I would be willing to help where I can and test the script.

What do people think? Otherwise this place will become a graveyard...

What i have heard is that it is nearly impossible to use the mklivecd scripts with 2008. 2008 is internally so different that the scripts have to be rewritten. I know Kris has tried but hasn't had much succes.

I guess we would need someone with the knowledge and experience of Kris to work on MCNLive. I know i am not that one. It will be hard to breath new live into MCNlive.

Hi Chris,

I think you did a real good job in the past four years.

Although I didn't do any testing the last years, I want to thank you for all your fantastic work. You deserve a lot off respect and you have mine.

Hope to see you sometime in the future.

Alain

actually according to the guys at MDV.com they arent using mklivecd anymore, I had a note a few months ago about what they were using, and for the life of me I cant find it anymore.

I'm sure if i asked over there, they could tell me, but i believe its a set of tools desiged for MDV, the issue is that there isnt ANY kind of documentation at all on this new toolset.

j

You're talking about the draklive scripts. That's what Mandriva is using nowadays.

The problem with that, is that it's very badly documented, and that a lot of features of the mklivecd scripts are not available in draklive (things we all love, like copy2ram, the options that made MCNLive so much better then MDV One).

yep youre right, I went back over to mdv.com and researched my earlier questions, it is draklive and the instructions, such as they are: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Pa.../Tools/draklive

how shall we say.............................blow

but if i find a hole in the space time continum, i may see which way is up one day....

Can draklive do on-the-fly remaster?

I can answer my own question: it can. So, apart from copy2ram, what other main advantages does mklivecd have? If not, then the difference to draklive wouldn't be that major at all, would it?

From the Draklive-wiki:

"mklivecd already allows to create live distributions, but it's not easy to keep it in sync with latest hardware or technical updates. mklivecd needs it's own long initrd script (linuxrc), as well as a new rc.sysinit file. It makes the boot very complicated, and it's not easy to maintain all these three programs (linuxrc, rc.sysinit, mklivecd) together."

That is exactly the problem that mklivecd now ran into....so....and that's why mklivecd probably has no future. Maybe we should try to work with draklive, email people and find out enough information to get it working, forego the copy2ram feature for now as a compromise, maybe find someone skilled who could add such a feature later on etc. Better than giving up completely, isn't it?

i can agree with that.

with the way that I use the mcnl type my image is way toobig to c2r anyway

its finding the draklive expert who's willing to talk thatll be hard.

i printed "the latest" copy i could get ahold of, its 32 pages and not not agreee w/ the earlier post about keeping all 3 together

j

I followed this topic with interest. Has anyone contacted Mandriva S.A. in Paris for technical help about this Draklive issue?

@azenz2: I think you are quite right when you say that mklivecd has no future, but there are some functions that doesn't seem to be possible with draklive.
Copy2ram is one of them, but also bootcodes like ntfsrw and vesa are impossible with drakelive. And what do you think about remastering? Not possible. A lot of those functions were added by Chris, and are not adopted into draklive. That was the main reason for Chris not to adopt draklive: I would cost more time to build those things in draklive, then to adjust mklivecd to the latest Mandriva release.

But, with 2008.0, I think it might be that the time has come that it's harder to get mklivecd running on 2008.0, then to adopt draklive... someone should put some time in getting to know draklive, and try to add the features of mklivecd in it. This would not be an easy task though. One should be able to code in Perl, and understand "the Mandriva way" of building the script This would probably take a hell of a lot of time, most of all because it's very badly documented.

Chris also mentioned that draklive has no way of creating a livecd off of an installed system. This might also mean that there's now way of configuring the system before you create the iso (and I mean things like changing the desktop wallpaper, changing the menu entry's etc (not sure if this is true though).


@RvP: I believe no-one has.
I am willing to do so, but I think I might not know enough about live-cd's in the first place... I was just using Chris' scripts to build FreeoLive from a preinstalled system. On the other hand.... who else (apart from Chris) has that knowledge? I think no-one has...

You can't remaster off an installed system? Then how do you use draklive??? I naturally thought you invoke the command from your system and it takes whatever you have and puts it into an iso....

Not necessarily, I'm building FreevoLive off a once installed, but never booted installation which resides on it's own partition. I believe this is what Chris did as well with MCNLive
This means you have two installations on your "build box", one to work on, and one for the livecd

Dear Chris,

Wondering how you are doing after more than one year.

You see this forum has died, because you stopped with the development of MCNLive.

Anyway, wish again to thank you for your excellent work. Am still using Delft in some circumstances.

All the best.