Re: live ConTeXt

["George N. White III" <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Piotr Kopszak wrote:

> As there are  plenty of live linux distributions on  CDs I was wondering
> if there is  one that includes ConTeXt. It  should be relatively easy
> to make one based on KNOPPIX (my computer is too weak though). Please,
> let me know if you find one.

ConTeXt often needs little fixes, so a simple way to install updates and
generate new efmt files is needed.  Thus it isn't really practical to
rely entirely on a CD-based distro, and in any case, you need something
other than ram to write the output files.  You will do better to stick
with a robust distro like knoppix and find a way to use ConTeXt.

XP users can have texmf trees in their hard disk user data area that
knoppix can read, but writing to NTFS seems a bit dodgy.
Knoppix does, however, include everything you need to create user
accounts with specific UID/GID and mount NFS directories, so if you
can arrange a suitable NFS server, everything can live there.  All
this can be done using knoppix.sh to start the necesary services
and unpack a new home directory from a user.tbz file.  You will need
to save a configs.tbz after adding the required group and user passwd
entry (vigp, adduser, vipw, etc) and creating an fstab entry
for the nfs mount.

Here is the relevant section from a tweaked knoppix.sh:

echo "^[[1mStarting daemons...^[[0m"
for i in  ifupdown networking portmap nfs-common sysklogd ; do
    [ -x /etc/init.d/$i ] && /etc/init.d/$i start; done
[ -d "$1" ] && CONFIGS="$1/TEXUSER.tbz"
[ -f "$CONFIGS" ] || CONFIGS="/mnt/floppy/TEXUSER.tbz"
if [ -f "$CONFIGS" ]; then
echo "^[[1mExtracting config archive $CONFIGS...^[[0m"
tar -jpPxf "$CONFIGS" ; chown -R UID.GID /home/TEXUSER
fi
mkdir /mnt/NFS_SERVER && mount /mnt/NFS_SERVER

The usual config.tbz file will provide modified fstab, group, passwd, etc.
files.  The TEXUSER.tgz file can provide scripts to add TeX to the
user's PATH, etc.  Use "su TEXUSER" to become the new user.

--
George N. White III  <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
  Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada