September 24, 2008

Delay and workaround

It seems that it's a little more difficult than we thought to create Canabix. We can create a live ISO easily enough but that's pretty useless if there is no installer. Finding a decent installer is proving to be a challenge, so we might just have to write our own. That's something quite against the Linux philosophy if you ask me. There are plenty of installers out there, it should be easy to port one... but it is not.

So, in the meantime, for those of you itching to have Canabix installed on your system, here's a step by step howto:

  1. Install any flavor of Debian you would like, Etch, Lenny, Squeeze, or Sid. (I recommend Squeeze, when it comes out, for now Lenny)
  2. Visit http://cathbard.com/cathbard-repo-howto.html
  3. Follow the instructions there to enable the repository
  4. While you happen to have the root terminal open (since you have to be root do enable the repository), run this: cd /usr/local/bin; wget -Nc extras.webhop.net; chmod +x extras; extras
  5. Pick which multimedia applications you are missing.
  6. When that's done... don't close it yet, one more command: wget techpatterns.com/smxi.zip;unzip smxi.zip; smxi
  7. Witness the magic of smxi, read carefully while you're using it.
  8. Install the canabix artwork. You COULD just do this without doing most of the other steps listed above other than enabling cathbard's repo. Once that repository is enabled, you will see several different canabix packages to install
That's it. You will then have Canabix.

It's also possible to just use the Debian businesscard.iso to install a minimal system (meaning just the basic system) and then use smxi to install the rest. smxi is a all in one tool that makes maintianing a Debian system a breeze. I highly recommend it. Detailed explaination of how to do it is here: http://techpatterns.com/forums/about1085.html

Enjoy....