A pre-installed virtual machine image could be the easiest solution.
It can be easily converted to different VM technologies, e.g. VirtualBox, KVM or VMware.
Just forward some ports or route an IP and you're good to go.
I suggest some standard distribution like Debian stable with automatic security updates for the guest.
It can be used on servers, desktops and small systems like the Raspberry Pi.
It can be bleeding edge with its unstable and experimental repositories.
It can be rock solid with the stable repository.
It comes with a non-free repository just in case you need proprietary firmware or drivers.
But wait, Debian is also a good choice if you're like RMS and want to fully embrace freedom:
It doesn't install anything non-free unless you explicitely allow it (since version 6.0).
Debian is one of the most versatile operating systems.
You can use GRUB2 with a single static cfg file just as well.
GRUB2 is cabable of mounting ISO images and loading contained kernels.
That means you can save unmodified liveCD ISO images on a boot partition with GRUB2 and load them directly.
This is not a CD or DVD emulator but simply loopback access, as if you'd mount it in Linux with mount -o loop foo.iso
If you want to retain the individual boot menus of your liveCDs, you need to recreate them with GRUB2 syntax.
Fortunately some, albeit very few, live CDs ship with a loopback.cfg for this purpose nowadays.
Off the top of my head, new Ubuntu releases and GRML do so. GRML was one of the first.
http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2011/01/07/booting-iso-images-from-within-grub2/
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/wiki/Loopback.cfg
http://grml.org/
TinyCore Linux uses one file system for each package, albeit with a very different intent:
Each package is a SquashFS file system that gets mounted & overlayed over the root FS at boot time.
Their intent is to save disk space.
That's an interesting proposition. A similar idea has been realized in the research Linux (and Hurd) distibution NixOS.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system — the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on — is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it’s purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this."
I just stumbled upon it recently. I have not tried it.
There's a generic dynamic & a generic static binary tarball.
I'm using the former in a TinyCore virtual machine.
The complete VM is about 140 megabytes and includes ALSA sound, Fluxbox, Chromium and Skype.
I can upload it as a VirtualBox appliance if anyone's interested,
Mistreatment of employees? Microsoft does none of this.
"The last incidence of a threatened jump over labor conditions was at a plant producing Microsoft's Xbox 360."
http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/04/27/foxconn.central.china.plant.sees.protest/
http://www.examiner.com/article/brazilian-foxconn-workers-threaten-strike-over-poor-working-conditions
Ironically, you couldn't even watch this video on the actual Raspberry Pi because Adobe doesn't produce their Flash player for it.
I criticize this issue regularly and get modded down for alleged trolling.
My bet is that someone at Slashdot is friends with or co-owns Ooyala, the media hosting company behind this tragedy.
Fortunately Ooyala is doomed to fail if they don't change their ways. Less and less Internet browsing devices are capable of executing Flash blobs.
... and another potentially Slashdot post that cannot be viewed in its entirety on free systems.
Why does Slashdot try to force the tool of oppression that is Adobe Flash on their readers?
Sad. It fits the Raspberry Pi though, a partially non-free system.
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Wine on non-x86 can't run x86 Windows applications. Qemu in theory could... very slowly, but then again that can run on Windows too.
There is ongoing work to change that: http://wiki.winehq.org/ARM
That way, all of WINE's Windows API code, including GDI, DirectX, etc... would run with native speed on ARM.
Only the target executable itself, excluding DLLs that are covered by WINE, would be emulated with QEMU.
I'm saddened by the fact that Slashdot staff deliberately ostracize non-users of the proprietary security nightmare that is Adobe Flash.
Unlike open and standardized formats, Flash is not even available on most platforms.
Slashdot, do you not remember your roots?
It's 2012 and possibilities to publish video in open ways are ubiquitous.
Vimeo, YouTube - both offer HTML5 video.
Or, if you want to host on your own, use the relatively new GNU licensed MediaGoblin.
Firefox still has the advantage of a vast extension base. I wouldn't want to use a browser without the complete equivalents of:
- Ghostery
- NoScript
- Cookie Monster (fine-grained cookie control)
- DNS Flusher (useful for IP v4/v6 dual-stack testing)
- FlashVideoReplacer
- Greasemonkey
- RefControl
- Tree Style Tab
- Firebug
- Web Developer
Nevertheless, Chromium still has its place on my system, mostly serving as an efficient and therefore battery saving browser for local HTML documentation.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
