Abstract

This project proposes a custom Live Linux called Open Roberta Live for conducting Roberta courses at scale, minimizing setup efforts and dependencies. Open Roberta Live is booted from a medium and comprises all software to get started with the Open Roberta Lab and supported Bots and Boards. This project realizes the generation of a bootable ISO file that can be used for this purpose.

Background

Participants of a Roberta course, in general, need a laptop with Open Roberta Connector (only supported with Linux, MacOS, and Windows and requires a Java Runtime), an USB Port, and a web browser with access to an Open Roberta Lab server to program OpenRoberta supported devices.

Benefits

• Using Open Roberta Live, laptops as used for Roberta® courses do not have to be dedicated for this purpose.
  Any laptop with minimal system requirements (e.g., 4GB RAM) that permits booting from a medium such as a USB drive, can be used.
• Open Roberta Live comprises, beyond the Linux operating system, all software dependencies to get started with Open Roberta®.
• Open Roberta Live provides an ephemeral user experience, i.e., after a reboot the system is always in a clean state.
• Apart, Open Roberta Live starts all software during boot and automatically opens a browser with Open Roberta Lab
• Eliminates network dependencies; that said, a WiFi connection can be preconfigured if wished.
• Permits scale by writing and distributing boot media.

Requirements for using Open Roberta Live

• RAM: >= 4GB
• Architecture: amd64
• Boot from external medium (e.g., USB or SD Card) possible

Requirements for building an Open Roberta Live image

• Fedora Linux (>= Release 37)
• super user (root) privileges

Architectural Diagram

The diagram below outlines how a(n automated) build process can look like using some Google Cloud products.