The Remixerator

I've been working on a new project as of late that uses the kickstart tinkering I did at the start of the quarter, and takes it a step further. The goal is to create a "remixerator" - an interface, ideally a web-based one, that allows a user to create a custom fedora remix (that is still RIT-themed in content and aesthetics). The end goal would be to put it into a machine similar to the kiosk, and have a very controlled and automated process for taking in a DVD, customizing the remix, and then burning the image for a user.

The customization of the remix is easy enough - it's just a generation of a kickstart. All of my custom scripting that was done can still be injected into the kickstart, what really changes is the configuration of applications. To start, I looked into various existing technologies that do similar things.

LiveUSB creator was not really relevant to what I was trying to do.
SuseStudio was very similar, but based on several cloud technologies that are not necessary to my project at hand. Furthermore, our RIT remixes were to run Fedora.
Kickstarter was too much targeted towards Meego.

And there were several other applications as well.

While I was  no eager to re-invent the wheel, none of the above projects really fit the bill. Ultimately, I decided that all I would have to do is make a web form (perhaps take the opportunity to learn some JQuery), generate a kickstart on submit, run the creation process, and serve up a webpage when it was finished.

The form was easy enough, just a bunch of html and JQuery running on twisted. Hosting things on twisted was pretty simple, too, to get started. However, things quickly became less trivial. Launching the script on a post was simple, but being able to constantly update a page, given the output of the create livecd process, would be difficult to tackle, and it was hard to believe there was another tool available that did some of this for me.

Looking again the other day, I stumbled across the dorrie project, which does much of what I wanted to do. It also has a convenient spot in its parser where I could likely inject the postscript sections that I wrote for the RIT remix. I'll take this approach from here on out, and bother with aesthetics later.