Experimental Hoary live CD available for testing

[Matt Zimmerman]

Andreas and I spent some time hacking on the live CD today, and it's
starting to come together.  As many of you know, we've redesigned the live
CD from scratch for Hoary, to simplify maintenance and to provide a base for
some interesting new features.  Here's what works so far:

- Boot into d-i
- Set up the live filesystem
- Pivot into the live filesystem
- Create a user
- Configure gdm autologin
- Initiate a normal boot sequence
- Login as root (no password)

You'll find that it looks very much like a normal Ubuntu system (more so
than the Warty live CD), and this is intentional.  Whereas the old live CD
used infrastructure derived from other live CD projects, the new design uses
infrastructure from existing Ubuntu components (for example, for hardware
detection), along with some completely new ideas.

Things which aren't finished yet include:

- There isn't much progress indication yet, and in some cases you may see a blue
  screen during much of the boot process.  If you are seeing a blue or red
  screen for too long, switch virtual consoles with Alt+F1 and Alt+F2.
  This will be fixed.

- There is as yet no means to automatically generate a working X
  configuration.  Daniel Stone is working on this.  Currently, gdm startup
  is suppressed and the boot process ends with a text console login.
  If you'd like to try out a desktop session, run:

  dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

  and answer the questions, then run /etc/init.d/gdm start

  I ran into a problem once where I needed to unload and reload the mousedev
  module in order to get the mouse working, but I haven't looked into it
  yet.

- The boot process asks a few too many questions.  This will be fine-tuned
  as things proceed.

Get it here:

http://people.ubuntu.com/~mdz/ubuntu-live/hoary-live-i386-alpha1.iso

and follow up here to let us know how it's working for you.  It's based on a
Hoary snapshot which was built by Andreas about one week ago, but we should
be able to build daily images fairly soon.

Enjoy!

-- 
 - mdz