We The Free

At work we normally do all our CentOS builds using Kickstart and our own local mirrors. On top of which I built a couple of custom repositories — one for own own private software, and one for customer boxes (with software such as updated Sendmail, Clam AV, SpamAssassin, etc).

That works very well, and a (reasonably performing) box takes about 5-10 minutes from plugging a flash stick in, to pulling it out and rebooting with a fresh OS install.

But one thing we’ve needed is to build a recovery stick for use on a customer’s site. The default LiveCDs are too bogged down with extraneous crap (like X for a start) to be of any use in the field, while the recovery option on an install CD suffers the opposite problem. I needed to build something that was the best of both worlds — it had to have heaps of tools on there and it had to boot quickly. On top of which we’ve got some custom stuff that would be useful to be able to carry around such as a custom version of gawk that has a lot of modules written by my boss, Don, such as file IO functions (ala libc), cgi, and more.

So I investigated building a flash image that would meet all our worldly desires.
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I’ve just finished creating a card game. It’s a simple 1-deck, play over lunch time at the kitchen table kind of game. I’m not sure about how many players it’s going to be good for and how my card ratios will play out (ie; too many or too few attack, defense, and goal cards), but playtesting will sort that out.

The gist of it is that you each play mobsters that have to get truck-loads of money onto a Money Train so it can be taken to the launderers. The first person to hit $10 million wins the game.

You will be able to attack other players by stealing their loot, causing their trucks to get lost via “detours”, dob them in to the cops, put out a hit on them, and more. Of course, there will be cards to block these actions too, such as “donut shops” to throw the cops off your trail, corrupt lawyers, and more mobsters.

Currently the deck size is probably suited to 2-4 players, but I’d like to get this to a max of 6 players without making the deck too unwieldy.

I’ll be playtesting it starting this week and over the xmas holidays, so send me an email, post on my BBS, or contact me on Facebook.