Make It Live
A couple of times recently I’ve wanted to try out some new software, only to be thwarted by a list of prerequisites as long as my arm. I’m talking about cutting edge software for Linux in particular… it often relies on cutting edge libraries that aren’t available in most Linux distributions. Getting all the right versions of those dependencies can become a major nightmare, having to build from source and often having to patch them in some way.
Two projects where I’ve recently had problems like this are Jokosher and Diva. Both these look like excellent bits of software, but the list of requirements make them a nightmare to try out. Some of the prerequisites are not available as packages for many distros and there are some requirements that need CVS versions of libraries and special patches. It just makes it too difficult to try the software out for anyone except the most determined user.
It seems to me that in order for cutting edge projects like these to get more people trying them out, it would be a good idea for them to produce a live CD which I could just boot from and have everything set up ready for them to work. All the right libraries and dependencies already there. Surely, with the number of live distros out there, it wouldn’t be too hard for them to take one of those, such as Knoppix, and modify it to include whatever dependencies they have? This would save such a lot of effort of those wanting to try out these bits of cutting edge software and would surely reduce the number of people that just give up…
September 28th, 2006 at 3:36
We agree, and we’ve talked about putting together a LiveCD to demonstrate Jokosher. The only issue we’ve had is that we don’t have anyone who’s done anything to do with livecds and also has a bit of time. It *is* difficult, currently, to try out Jokosher because you need totally-up-to-date CVS versions of things like gstreamer; however, this is because we found bugs in gstreamer when writing Jokosher and the gst people have kindly patched them for us
Hopefully we’ve now ironed out most of those, and so when this version of gstreamer gets into distributions that’ll be enough for Jokosher for evermore…
December 6th, 2006 at 10:32
Or even better: put together a small VMware image with the software you want to demo, so that people can download it and run it through the free VMware player or server — there’s an extensive selection of pre-built VMware images already at VMware’s web site.