Sharing SD or USB images/installs

[moridin1138]

Quick question and perhaps it's my newbness coming through, but I have a quick question. 

Is there any reason why we can't just start sharing and distributing our SD, USB flash and HDD images?  We're all running the same hardware, so that end shouldnt be a problem.
Wouldnt it just be as easy as changing some uboot parameters and we're good to go?

This'd be nice, IMO.  We'd just have to setup a place to share them, people could get going with instant configurations, drivers and software already installed.  Even more so with people doing dev work, or wanting to get started quickly when their plug first arrives.

I suppose I am just being lazy and not actually going through the trouble of doing this myself, but I wanted to get some thoughts.

Cheers!

[pushbx]

Problem is that all my passwords, settings, webpages, would be shared with everyone.  Probably not what I want.

Maybe it is possible to release an image that has the latest kernel and fixes to the default filesystem.  All other software pretty much is just an apt-get away.

[jlpoole]

I'd like to see a Gentoo based downloadable kernel with builds of larger installs in compiled format to save time.  I'm looking into seeing if I can provide that -- but my knowledge in this area is about nihil and my time is limited.  : (

[elBradford]

Has anyone here used VMWare appliances? The same idea could apply here - have some of the experts make some images for certain tasks (ie Home Server, Web Server, whatev) that are generic enough to be helpful for a broad swath of people, but of course it's linux so the end user could continue customizing it to fit the individual perfectly.

I for one would appreciate that, since I have yet to learn how to compile my own kernel (I'm just not ready yet for the time commitment required to learn it!) and I would love some of the features such as CPU stepping, NTFS support, etc.

[Brian]

Have a look at the new installer, it comes bundled with a modularized kernel.
http://www.plugcomputer.org/plugwiki/index.php/SheevaPlug_Installer

The new installer and mainstream kernel may ease some of the challenges people face testing stuff.  It will certainly make things like NFS4, USB hardware and other items not compiled into the marvel kernel easier to work with. 

I still don't see any reason why you couldn't package up file-system tar-balls, but apt is pretty efficient.  I suspect many of the challenges are related to customizing the kernel for specific situations rather than challenges customizing the file system.