Throwing cold water!

Ok, so lots of people want a simple CD of EMC that will just load and
go.

Sorry, but I dont think it can be made quite so simple. Any form of
'disk image' copy will have the requirement of very nearly identical
hardware, and particularly in the area of graphics and X config, that is
just not going to work.

Red Hat et.al. have spent a lot of money to develop simple to use
install scripts. Go with the flow, and use a standard distribution. let
Red Hat figure out all the isssues of packaging.

To run EMC requires two additioanl parts. A RT patched kernel and the
EMC software.

The RT patches are the big problem. They are VERY kernel source
dependent. What we need is for someone to properly apply the patches,
then make a new tarball of that source tree, and put that on CD or on
the net. Then to build the kernel one simply loads that tarball into the
right place and runs a kernel build- a simple 4 or 5 step process.
Dave had a few of these CDs at NAMES, and I built a rt kernal from it in
just a few miutes.

The EMC software ought to be packaged into an rpm. Then it would be no
more difficult to install than anyone of thousands of Linux packages.
Its not to bad just as a tar ball, but it would be better as an rpm.

Back a few months when this topic was very hot, someone noted that if
you followed the directions EXACTLY the install went fairly well. I
think that is still true. But if you expect a CD to just pop in the
drive and magicly an EMC system is running I think you will be
disappointed.

ron