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Talk:Live DVD Blueprint

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Suggestions:

  1. Remastersys : pro - easy-to-use; con - adds its own cruft. Perhaps another tool (e.g. UCK) may also be considered.
  2. Backup Mechanism - the koha-run-backups script and associated cron job definition are already present. The periodicity of the cron job can be changed. However, the present mechanism creates the backups owned by superuser, this creates perm issues for newbies. An incrontab driven script can take care of this.
  3. Extent of Koha customisation - Customization of BKS framework. This is a sample framework. Perhaps it would be better to leave BKS alone and create a new framework (i'm hypothetically calling it the 'newbie framework')
  4. Materials to be included in the DVD - consider the inclusion of at least Koha's EN manual.
  5. Inclusion of Koha Offline Circ Firefox extension with the shipped copy of FF.
  6. Links to some of the excellent video tuts that are available on CC licensing - a whole lot of which has been contributed by Nicole / ByWater

-- Indranil Das Gupta 02:43, 28 February 2013 (EST)


  1. Newbies won't care about cruft. Known cruft is better than unknown cruft.
  2. Hmmm... an added crontab job to copy backups to the newbie permissions. Interesting idea.

     4. Since (5) implies a DESKTOP installation (since newbies can't really handle server), we could have bookmarks in firefox or whatever browser is readily accessible.

     5. Like the idea, except for newbies, they'll probably just run their library from this one computer they install it on. Is offline ever going to happen?

     6. Like the idea. Bookmarks again, like 4?

-- M. Tompsett 09:37 2013-02-28 (EST)


  1. Cruft is bad mmmkay, whether its known or not.
  2. The packages store the sql backups group readable by the group the koha user is in -rw-r----- 1 root testkoha-koha
  3. Agree, adding a new framework is much better than editing one that will get stomped by any upgrade
  4. Local copy is better than links to the web, lots of the users of this livedvd will not have reliable internet
  5. Who knows, can you predict that? I can't, so why not put the offline client there in case
  6. Local copies again make more sense

--Chris 14:10, 28 February 2013 (EST)


Oops! the Koha user's group does have read perm for backups. :P

In my experience, have not really seen too many actual user logging in into the koha user account.

My idea was including the incron daemon package in the DVD image, have a root incrontab entry to watch out for new backup files being created, and then automatically copying them over to a folder in current user's home. I had hacked up one, the screen cast is here [1].

In my particular use-case, it did involve creating a .desktop file according to XDG specs as well as menu and directory entries as I wanted the script to be call-able from the system menu as well.

--Indranil Das Gupta 23:18, 28 February 2013 (EST)

Its even easier than that, did you know that any user with superlibrarian privileges can download the latest backup from within Koha itself, we made it like that so those offering SaaS couldn't hold data hostage :) --Chris 23:52, 28 February 2013 (EST)


  1. Inclusion of too many materials (e.g. Video tutorials) make the DVD big. Inclusion of manual is OK. It will take too much time for download.
  2. Addition of Offline client is a nice suggestion. Need to add any other useful small tools (e.g. glabel) ?
  3. Chris mentioned about GUI for backup from Koha staff client. This feature available in Koha 3.12 version?
  4. We can create a new framework for customized fields. Upgrade to new version shatter this framework?
  5. In my opinion Remastersys is good for creating a clone of the system. Simplicity is the main feature.

     Users can make ISO of the system as a backup using remastersys. Its backup mechanism can retain user settings and the exact environment of the master PC.

-- Vimal Kumar V. (pasted by Mark Tompsett from his email) 04:23, 02 March 2013 (EST)

More discussions are welcome

  • Would you consider other languages interface, Traditional Chinese Taiwan in particular? Include Ubuntu Language utilities, and Koha I18N/L10N.

- Anthony Mao

If so we have to add few more popular languages in International level (e.g. Spanish, French etc.)