blogs.czapski.id.au

I have been quite remiss in the last 5 years or so, with my blog. The software I worked with in that time, and still do, is so vendor-, industry- and use case-specific that it was not really possible to develop blog articles that would be generally applicable, or at least of interest to people other these who work with the software with which I have been working.

Over these years I built a number of virtual machine images which I used to demonstrate the software and solutions. While the software and solutions were pretty point-specific, a lot of the things I did to construct, configure and deliver demonstrations are pretty generic and might be of possible interest to people who likewise need to build demonstration images for infrastructure software and fairly complex solutions that don’t have just a single GUI to demonstrate.

In the, hopefully, series of blogs, I will works through specific aspects of demo image creation and configuration, showing how one can script creation of menus, hotspots, toolbar buttons, screen backgrounds and a bunch of other things. The things which I had to do time and again, and which I endeavoured to script so that I could simply copy and paste text into a terminal window and the objects would be created without having to go through manual configuration using GUIs.

I picked a RedHat 6.8-like OS, CentOS, because I want that flavour and that version of the OS and, most specifically, I want Gnome 2 – not Gnome 3.

Series so far:

1. Build and Configure the Base Image
   1. Configure Virtual Box Virtual Machine and Install CentOS 6.8 Base Image
   2. CentOS 6.8 – Configure “demo” user for autologin, sudo and VirtualBox Shared Folder access
   3. CentOS 6.8 – Show Detailed Grub Boot Loader Feedback
   4. CentOS 6.8 – Disable Screen Saver and other delays
   5. CentOS 6.8 – Disable Firewall and SELinux Security
   6. CentOS 6.8 – Disable Unneeded Services
   7. CentOS 6.8 – Update DHCP address in /etc/hosts at boot
2. Configure Working Environment
   1. CentOS 6.8 – Script Adding Top Panel Applets – GEyes, ShowDesktop and Gnome Monitor
   2. CentOS 6.8 – Script adding a new gnome-terminal profile
   3. CentOS 6.8 – Create desktop branding scripts and brand desktop
   4. CentOS 6.8 – Script creating a new demo user
   5. Scripts to hide standard desktop icons and make top and bottom panels hideable
3. Miscellaneous
   1. Resize Linux Virtual Box Virtual Disk

So, watch this space over the next while and see if any of what I will be writing about helps you.