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Portable development environment

 

Hi all,
Due to my own "mobility" (so to speak) needs I've recently set up a portable OSHIP development environment, based on the amazingly small distro: Slitaz GNU/Linux (http://www.slitaz.org/en/index.html). As this technique may be useful for others developers as well, I decided to share this experience here.

The complete Linux environment (including Firefox, gcc, python, Grok etc) takes less than 1Gb and can either be booted from a USB pendrive or run inside a virtual environment (mine is QEMU: http://www.nongnu.org/qemu/). In both cases, start by downloading the "slitaz-cooking.iso" file from: http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/index.html#cooking .

For a LiveUSB install, the easiest way is to use Unetbootin (as explained here: http://wiki.slitaz.org/doku.php?id=quickstart:live_usb), remembering that you must run the "tazusb writefs" command (http://www.slitaz.org/en/doc/manuals/tazusb.en.html; also available by right-click) everytime before closing, to make your changes permanent (i.e. save them back to the USB stick).

The QEMU install is only a bit more complicated. After installing QEMU for your platform, create a 1GB virtual disk image and boot the slitaz-cooking.iso, as explained here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Images#Creating_an_image . Then, you simply have to perform a regular HD install (http://www.slitaz.org/en/doc/handbook/install.html). I did it by opening a terminal, creating a single /dev/hda1 partition (no swap) with "fdisk /dev/hda" and then running "slitaz-installer".

In either case, once the Slitaz "cooking" flavor is installed and running, it's enough to use the "tazpkg" command to add the following packages (ready for copy&paste):
tazpkg get-install slitaz-toolchain
tazpkg get-install python
tazpkg get-install python-dev
tazpkg get-install setuptools
tazpkg get-install virtualenv
tazpkg get-install bazaar
...and then you can continue by following the generic install FAQ (https://answers.launchpad.net/oship/+faq/391), with "virtualenv --no-site-packages oshipenv" and so on.

 Regards,
Roberto.



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