[Dev] Parabola as an option for Purism Librem laptops

[Josh Branning]

On 05/07/17 19:45, Joshua Haase wrote:
> Mladen Pejaković <mladen.pejakovic at puri.sm> writes:
>
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>> Hello Parabola community!
>>
>> Now, to the point. Besides our PureOS (Debian based OS, without
>> non-free), we want to offer other distros as an option to our customers.
>> Those will come on an USB drive, with small fee just to cover the USB
>> cost and labour. We are considering to offer Parabola live install image
>> as well, therefore, we want to ask if this is okay with the Parabola
>> community?
>
> I like the idea as long as the process is publicly documented and
> reproducible.

AFAIK, the parabola build system isn't publicly documented and 
reproducible as it currently stands. It would be great to see this 
happen though.

>
> I think there are/weree people working on a Live ISO for parabola.

The CLI version of parabola works fine as a live ISO. I don't know about 
the MATE desktop version though.

>
> Don't know whether a custom installer is needed

I am not a official developer, but I suggest either using the default 
ISO, and building from (on top of) that (there's probably a way to 
repack an ISO with modifications and/or scripts, I have done so before 
with Debian, but never parabola [1]), or failing that taking a look at 
parabolaiso [2] to completely rebuild a customised ISO.

(... I think Adonay was nudging for the former method.)

In both cases, the source code will need to be provided by puri.sm; most 
liberally if you are to distribute, probably in the most practically 
reproducible form where possible (build system), but also for the 
binaries or machine code for the software you distribute (parabola).

I assume you are already doing this for the Debian based OS, so 
shouldn't be too much of a problem for puri.sm to do the same for Parabola.

I think a good way to distribute the sources for projects like these, 
would be to first set up a mirror from which you intend to distribute 
them. As long as the mirror is in sync with the parabola servers, this 
would be a good method or flow for [legally] constructing customised 
free software operating systems in general, not just for parabola, but 
other distros too. If the mirror is added to the list of parabola 
mirrors, it would also go some way to reducing the load on the official 
parabola servers. It would also mean that you could theoretically 
continue to produce ISOs, even if the internet were to go down.

Enough said now,


Josh

[1] http://www.publicsite.org/J05HYYY/software_downloads/IonianMaker.tar.gz
[2] https://git.parabola.nu/~~obsolete/parabolaiso.git/