Yesterday a friend of mine who teaches CompSci at one of the colleges caught me on chat with the line that he was bored. Being from a school of thought which associates being bored with you-know-who’s workshop I thought it was time to get others do some bit of stuff I had never found time to check out.

So here goes:

Create a GNOME centric 2 CD Fedora based distribution. Just in case you wonder what it takes, here comes the listing of the required bits:

%packages

@admin-tools
@base-x
@dialup
@editors
@games
@gnome-desktop
@graphical-internet
@graphics
@java
@office
@printing
@sound-and-video
bsf
comps-extras

Just in case you feel lost – here’s the roadmap (look for the Anaconda Customisation links)

But the above is not enough to make your secret sauce work. Here’s some more bits of infrastructure changes you require to do:

[1] Ensure that you use a custom kickstart that always does askmethod for installs. Good for UseCases where you have a NFS/HTTP/FTP dump ready and of course a no brainer if you have the CDs at hand.
[2] Ensure that you have a rescue kickstart put in that does not format /home when re-installing
[3] Add yum to a cron that checks up the repositories on a daily/alternate day basis
[4] Shut down all unwanted services during startup
[5] Take out a few of the virtual consoles

And if you have done all this and are still not satisfied,

[1] Attempt to extend the functionality of Yumex by allowing repositories to be added through the GUI if an appropriate link-to-repo-file is passed.

[2] Take out the requirement of root user from the system or at least investigate the possibility

ps: While doing all of the above please ensure that you keep posting about your efforts to a blog/journal/website and perhaps also try and rustle up a few of the students as beta testers for this project.