After helping out in this year's Florida Drupalcamp, I began to wonder if there was a better way to get a working Drupal installation on attendees computers. With the wide variety of operating systems and configurations and the often unreliable wifi situations, why not package a live cd that users can boot to with everything they need?
I had just updated Crunchbang Statler and noticed a very handy install script that basically added a LAMP environment along with git and a few other things.
I added some automatic login and installed a Drupal 7 Installation in the localhost, and then set Chrome to open automatically to the site.
Then using Remastersys I packaged the whole thing up into an burnable .iso that boots a live duplicate.
I've packaged it up on GitHub: https://github.com/benhosmer/Drupal-Camp-Live-CD
The README has further instructions and details the software installed and also has all of the passwords needed.
I wouldn't mind some help testing it and if you know any organizers that might find it useful, pass it on to them. It could easily be customized with a camp-specific installation of Drupal for the beginner's tracks.
Comments
You might checkout WebEnabled
You might checkout WebEnabled for this: http://www.webenabled.com
You can package a custom Drupal installation or a default one. It might take a few minutes to get everyone signed up and the site instantiation process takes a couple minutes.
Yes, I use webenabled,
Yes, I use webenabled, however often at Drupalcamps wifi is sketchy.
This is the one I would
This is the one I would use:
Instead of Live CD, it installs Ubuntu as a runnable disk image on your machine.
http://drupal.org/project/quickstart
See also, notes from DrupalCon BoF session:
http://ietherpad.com/drupal-on-windows
Ryan Price
DrupalEasy Podcast
I hadn't heard of quickstart
I hadn't heard of quickstart before. It looks interesting. My only drawback would be that users would have to still install it, although I imagine the installation would be fairly simple.