COMP 3000 Distribution Report Specifications 2011

Format

Your report should ideally be submitted on the wiki (see the signup page); however PDF is also acceptable. If you submit a MS Word file, expect it to be opened in Libreoffice or Openoffice and hence its formatting and contents may be changed and/or corrupted.

Note that reports submitted on the wiki will be indexed in major search engines automatically. If you wish your report to remain private, please submit a PDF.

Be sure to upload a link to your report or your PDF to WebCT by the due date.

Recording Authorship

Please do not include your name and student number in the body of your wiki page. Instead, please submit a link to your paper via webct. If there is joint authorship of the report, then both authors should submit a link to the page. Both authors should also include a note stating the name of their co-author.

Part I

Due: October 19, 2011

The key goal of Part I is to report on the user experience with your chosen operating system distribution.

This first part of your distribution report should be divided into five sections that should be 1000-1500 words (4-6 pages excluding figures) in length. If this portion is longer that is fine, except that the graders may stop reading soon after 1500 words/page 6. If you encounter difficulty generating sufficient material, then you should talk with the TAs or the instructor.

Background

This section should detail background information about your distribution. Please describe:

• The name of the distribution,
• its goals and target audience,
• who develops it,
• how it may be obtained,
• its approximate size,
• and its heritage (what other OS distribution(s) is it derived from.

Also include any other background information that you feel is relevant for understanding the rest of your report.

Installation/Startup

In this section, detail how you got the distribution up and running. Ideally, include a screenshot or two of the installation/boot procedure. Describe the setup of the virtualization software you used, if any. Also detail any problems you encountered and how you overcame them (or didn't).

Basic Operation

Here describe your experience in using your distribution for simple use cases. You should attempt to use the distribution for its intended purpose; if this is not feasible, explain why but still do your best to use it in some capacity. Again, explain any problems you encountered. Also, if feasible, include a screenshot of some typical or interesting activities.

Usage Evaluation

To what extent does your chosen distribution meet its design goals? What is your overall impression of it? Be candid and specific in your critique or praise.

References

List all references used in proper bibliographic form, if any. Be sure to cite these sources in the main text as appropriate.

Grading Criteria

The grade for this part of the report will be out of 10 points, with:

• 6 points for content, with:
  • 1 for background,
  • 1 for installation/startup
  • 2 for basic operation
  • 1 for usage evaluation
  • 1 for references
• 2 point for grammar, spelling, and sentence structure
• 2 points for style

Here is the criteria for each of these categories:

• Background: To get a full point, the background should give a coherent overview of how this distribution fits into the larger software ecosystem. A half point will be given for background sections that cover most of the relevant details but do so in a way that is not easily understandable by the rest of the class, e.g., using non-obvious acronyms without fully explaining them.
• Installation/Startup: One point will be given for giving a full installation and startup walkthrough as detailed in the instructions. Half a point will be given for mostly complete instructions that, however, would be hard to replicate.
• Basic Operation: Two points will be give here for properly discussing at least two use cases. One point will be give if you only have one use case or if you have two that are incompletely presented.
• Usage Evaluation: A coherent paragraph presenting and defending your view of the distribution gets the full point here. Anything less than this will receive zero points.
• References: You have to give at least one reference in proper bibliographic style to get this point. A simple listing of URLs gets zero points.
• Grammar, spelling, and sentence structure: To get the full two points, the report should be written with well-structured, grammatically correct sentences with all words correctly spelled and capitalized. A report with a significant numbers of grammar or spelling errors that, overall, do not detract from an understanding of the paper will get only one point. Zero points will be awarded if the errors present make it hard to read the document.
• Style: To get full marks, your paper should be organized to present the information in an easy-to-understand fashion that is engaging to read yet still technically informative. Reports that present information in disconnected lists with minimal unifying text will get 1 point. (This is a significant issue with the software packages - those can be much better discussed in a consolidated fashion rather than one package at a time.) Incoherent papers will get 0 for style.

Part II

Due: November 16, 2011, 11:30 PM

The goal for Part II is for you to investigate and report what software is in your chosen distribution and how it is put together. My preference is that you work with the same distribution as for Part I. If you switch distributions, please include a background section as in Part I.

Software Packaging

How is software packaged for this distribution?

• What packaging format and utilities are used?
• How can you use these utilities to get a list of installed packages?
• How do you add and remove packages?
• How extensive is the software catalog for this distribution?

Please also include any other relevant information on the software packages associated with your distribution.

Major package versions

Report on the version numbers and upstream source (URL of original source) for some of the major software packages included in your distribution as part of the standard install:

• Linux Kernel or other kernel
• libc
• X.org or other GUI foundation
• Major GUI toolkits (Gtk+, Qt, Motif, etc.)
• shell (bash, csh, etc.)
• utilities (ls, ps, busybox)
• software packaging (rpm, dpkg, etc.)
• Web browser
• email
• other packages that are key to system usage

Choose at least 10 packages that fit into this list (you don't need to cover every category) and report the following:

• What is the vintage of the included package? How old is it, and how far is it behind the latest stable release for this package?
• How heavily has the package been modified by the distribution authors? (You'll need to figure out how to determine this.)
• Why do you think this particular package was chosen for this distribution's standard install? You may speculate, but please make an argument informed by relevant facts.

Initialization

Here describe how your distribution initializes itself. Specifically, give an outline of what programs are executed and in what order. Also document how you discovered this information. You do not need to include every program; however, you should be able to identify at least five major programs that are run.

Note that you should provide an explanation for how all of the major processes end up running on a fully initialized system.

Grading Criteria

The grade for this report will be out of 10 points, with:

• 6 points for content, with:
  • 1 for software packaging,
  • 2 for package versions, and
  • 3 for initialization
• 2 point for grammar, spelling, and sentence structure
• 2 points for style

Here is the criteria for each of these categories:

• Software packaging: To get full marks, this section should give a short, concise, but clear statement about how software is packaged for the system. Most reports will probably get the full one point for this section.
• Package versions: 1.5 points are for an accurate discussion of at least 10 software packages, 0.5 is for documenting how you obtained this information (the full process). Discussing fewer than 10 packages automatically loses you one point unless there are special circumstances related to your distribution. Note that in order to get all 1.5 points for the software packages, you need to explain why this particular version of each package was used. For example, it is not enough to say why Firefox was included; say why Firefox 4.0 was included.
• Initialization: This is the most important part of the report. Here, you should document what processes are running on your distribution when it is fully initialized (1 point), explain what they do (1 point), and explain how each is started (1 point). Please do not discuss each process in a separate bullet point; instead, organize and categorize them. Omit redundant or irrelevant details. Your goal should be to teach the reader a bit about how the distribution is put together!
• Grammar, spelling, and sentence structure: To get the full two points, the report should be written with well-structured, grammatically correct sentences with all words correctly spelled and capitalized. A report with a significant numbers of grammar or spelling errors that, overall, do not detract from an understanding of the paper will get only one point. Zero points will be awarded if the errors present make it hard to read the document.
• Style: To get full marks, your paper should be organized to present the information in an easy-to-understand fashion that is engaging to read yet still technically informative. Reports that present information in disconnected lists with minimal unifying text will get 1 point. (This is a significant issue with the software packages - those can be much better discussed in a consolidated fashion rather than one package at a time.) Incoherent papers will get 0 for style.

Part III

Due: December 5, 2011

For Part III, you will be revising your Part I and II reports. Work done on these sections will be used to revise your grade (upwards) for the previously assigned I and II grades.

Pay particular attention to the last sentence of the Part II instructions: "Note that you should provide an explanation for how all of the major processes end up running on a fully initialized system." To do this part, you should get a list of processes that are running after system bootup and after a person has logged in. Processes marked with [] are generally kernel threads; the others were started at some point by an initialization script. Your job is to explain how those processes came to be running on the system.

You do not need to give an explanation of all the processes that are created when a user logs in manually. If your system automatically starts a user session on boot and is running specialized application(s), explain those as well. For more generic user sessions, you just need to which process starts the processes of the user session.