This all started with training programme for teachers of Amravati University, PR(aka Prabhu) asked, "Can we have a LiveCD kind of setup with all Python goodies packaged together?". The motivation was to have a handy DVD for conducting workshops in better way. Rather then fixing systems with all packages for all participants, lets have this, which can be booted directly. And once they are comfortable, they can install also.
I had already done similar kind of work previously at Sarai. I was very much impressed by working and ease of Ubuntu customization. Documentation available is really well written. Following it, one can roll out one's own Ubuntu release in no time. Though there are GUI tools available, I was more comfortable with this approach. After following basics I wrote a simple script with all commands to make things very fast.
The biggest challenge was to satisfy PR, once I presented him the first "in-house" DVD on Virtual Box, he got really excited. Then started deep hacking of the DVD to fit in various tools and latest release of packages. It was really extensive and feed back and requirements from PR were very frequent. We used to sit together and hack this media for hours.
Some of the beasts we put in this DVD were sage binary(at present 32 bit) 4.1.1, latest Mayavi-3.3.0, entire ets(Enthought Tool Suit), documentations for respective packages and lot more. Complete list is available here.
After this we had really long bike-shedding on how to package this, how to name different versions. And Madhu, PR and Vattam came up with awesome idea of using
But still we were missing something. It needed more hacks. We had all packages but they were all hidden behind scary but awesome linux terminal. Hence we thought of introducing a new menu entry. We created a new /usr/share/desktop-directories/Python.directory file, and added entries to /usr/share/applications/ to come up with:
One more addition was adding videos to DVD itself, so that it is a complete bundle. One wants to get started with Python, there are 8 hours videos bundled inside DVD itself. For that we tweaked /etc/skel/examples.desktop :)
PS: people were asking me to write a blog, and here I ended up with a "ramayan."
