Morning Star Linux

Creating the Distribution

We created the distribution using Reconstructor 2.8 and the Desktop version of Ubuntu 8.04. Additional graphics were produced using free software like Inkscape, Paint.Net and GIMP. We use Reconstructors to chroot into an emulation of the LiveCD and make modifications. Most changes were made manually at the command line. Reconstructor also has several modules which can be used to automate installing Adobe Flash & related Firefox plugins. We used another set of modules to strip OpenOffice, GAIM and GIMP from the distribution. We removed OpenOffice to accomodate more software. Ultimately, we want the user to only have one or two simple post-install steps, rather than many complex steps.

Software stack

The following applications, utilities and modifications were added:

• Childsplay (game)
• Pingus (game)
• Wbar (taskbar application)
• Gnomesword2 (Bible software)
• KDE-EDU (Large collection of educational software; highly popular in our user testing)
• OpenDNS (Internet content filtering)
• MS Core Fonts (font support for websites, makes rendering look more natural)
• RAR archive support
• tree (simple administration tool)
• SSH/SCP (secure remote login, file transfer protocol for administrator)
• Adobe Flash, Firefox media plugins

Extra software

One of our assets, Machine 4 (Samuel), has a LAMP stack. This was installed through:

$sudo tasksel install lamp-server

We also installed the latest release of Joomla!, an easy to use Content Management Solution.

Post-install steps

At this stage, there are several possible post-install paths

For setting up a basic system, the user only needs to install OpenOffice.

For games and software, we advise that they run the following command:

$sudo apt-get install kdeedu pingus

For a more sophisticated interface, the user still needs to run Debian packages for Wbar and Wbarconf. This step is still too complex for easy use; hopefully a later iteration of the distribution could resolve this problem.