LiveCD Script, Its beginning, Unity and PCLinux

Progress of LiveCDs had a bumpy ride.

The story as it is told to me is as follows;
But I do not know how true the facts are.

However, I discovered LiveCD in 2007 with PCLinux 2007 long time after its hatching.

LiveCD project was stagnant at the beginning which was understandable and had a SINGLE developer working on it.
 

That developer joined Unity Linux and all 25+ developers there decided to help him make some progress on it.  

The impact LiveCDs made on me is substantial and never waned.

In the meantime, they took the initiative to make improvements.  

For example, they gave it 64bit compatibility.  

They gave it better detection capacity.  

They took the code and gave it better international language support.  

All those things are made available for FREE to any distribution wanting to download a snapshot from SVN.

Now, if anyone has a claim to LiveCD as ‘theirs’ it would be Jaco Greefe who was the principal on the project LONG before any distributions other than Mandrake aka Mandriva even worked with it.  

The script creator Jaco Greefecame from Mandrake Project.

Texstar used Jaco’s project mklivecd and created the original PCLinuxOS 2003 release. 

This release was based on Mandrake 9.2 at the time and a few other Mandrake developers began to debug the script through the creation of PCLinuxOS.  

Mandrake was a trademarked name, so Texstar named it PCLinuxOS.

As you can see, if any one distribution has claim to mklivecd, it would be Mandrake aka Mandriva which was where the script creator/s came from. 

It’s also where the script was first made usable. 

Texstar made it into a nice package with PCLinuxOS which  is totally true.

Texstar only had 32 bit version and only supported English language.

Unity which branched off from Mandrake/PCLinux continues to improve the Live Script with 64bit and addded even udev.

Unity approach is for the Live script to work for other distributions not just for Mandriva derived distributions.

It is targeting developers and savvy guys and not newbies and users.

There have been many attempts by Unity Linux developers to get other distributions that use mklivecd involved with the development of it.  

That invitation is always open to any and all distributions that use it.

As it is Unity is struggling with manpower shortages and its development has again gone into crisis situation and stagnation. 

This is where even a good product may be lost at the end due to lack of improvements and enthusiasm.

The Goal of Unity as stated below are

Unity Linux targets DEVELOPERS.  

We don’t target end users.  

If end users like Unity, GREAT!  

If not, we don’t worry about it.  

Unity Linux has derivative distributions called “branches” that work to target the end user.  

Unity Linux itself is targeted squarely at distribution developers and advanced users who want to be able to use the mklivecd scripts.

Unity attempt at refining the core utilities and it is just over 300 MiB.

1. Humanity.

2. Synergy

3. BBI are only three of its derivatives.

Hope everybody get together and help Unity Linux (not the Ubuntu desktop) to keep the spirit of Unity in Diversity and have a refined product at the end of the day.

Update is long overdue.

I have used the Unity 2010.2 and made a Live USB.

I tried to fiddle with the script (mind you it is in graphic form and not command line and terminal) and mounted an iso file of a distribution which was not a Unity derivative (which I was able to do with UnetBootIn) and it failed to mount the sfs file of that distribution.

It is not of the class of UnetBootin yet but given time and effort mklivecd scripts should become the gold standard of LiveCDs.