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Sun, 20 Jun 2010

Debian Live Web Images Builder

Richard Nelson, an outstanding debian-live contributor and team member since many years, has setup an instance of the live-helper CGI scripts that are included within live-helper.

This webbuilder lets users get their own customized images without the need of having to install live-helper and build them on their own. It's available at live-helper.debian.net.

Apart from having some better looking html form and adding an online-help that will be worked on soon, it's working great. Thanks you, Richard.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Wed, 27 Aug 2008

Debian Live Lenny Beta1

This is a post of the original announcement sent to debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org.

The Debian Live team is pleased to announce the first beta of Debian Lenny's Live images.

Although we missed releasing images for Etch along with the installer images, we are now prepared to release live images within the regular Lenny release process. This is the first official release of Debian Live and the whole team has been working hard during the past 2.5 years to make Debian's own live systems become a reality.

Nevertheless, we do need your help to find more bugs and improve the live systems, so please try them out. The images are available at: 

	http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/lenny_live_beta1/

Please also have a look at the known issues listed below.

Main features

100% Debian

The build process of Debian Live basically consists of creating a Debian chroot, installing one or more kernels along with live-initramfs (a set of hooks into initramfs-tools for handling booting from read-only media) and generating a bootable image from that.

This process is handled by live-helper, a collection of shell scripts that allow us to automate and customize this process. Considerable care is taken to ensure that the resulting live system is not tainted by the host system and that installed packages are not modified morethan absolutely necessary.

This ensures that Debian Live really is Debian, and not "just another" a Debian-based live system.

Flavours

Although live-helper is a toolkit to produce your very own live systems with only a few steps, we also provide prebuilt images that are meant to be used as reference systems for end-users. Currently, this consists of the three major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE and Xfce), as well as a small 'standard' image without a graphical environment.

For the desktop environments, package selection is performed by 'tasksel' with the respective desktop task, whilst the 'standard' image contains only packages of "Priority: standard" or greater, notwithstanding a handful of live-specific packages (console-common, eject, file, kbd, live-initramfs, locales, sudo and vim-tiny).

Image types

Debian Live offers prebuilt images for CD/DVD discs, USB sticks (or any HD-media-like device), tarballs (for PXE netboot) as well as a bare squashfs image to boot from the web directly.

Live Magic

Live Magic is an GUI frontend around the live-helper scripts, offering a subset of the features of live-helper in an easy-to-use graphical user interface.

live-magic 1.0 was recently uploaded to sid and is the recommended version. It currently supports 7 languages.

Live Installer

Live Installer is a special udeb for the Debian Installer that (optionally) replaces a part of d-i in order to install the system from the live image instead of to bootstrapping it from .deb packages. This way, a live system can be easily installed to the harddisk, ensuring that the look and feel of the installation (including preseeding) works the same as the regular installer process.

Unfortunately, live-installer does still have a few minor bugs left and is thus not included in our builds yet; we hope to be able to include it in the next beta.

Known issues in this release

  • The prebuilt images for gnome-desktop and kde-desktop are a bit too big to fit on a CD. Although the automatic installation of Recommends was disabled to build the images, they are still too big. This will need further tweaking as they are supposed to fit with the next beta.

  • The rescue flavour, containing system rescue and forensic related packages, is missing in this beta release.

  • There will be a DVD image with the next beta that includes all three desktop environments so that you can choose at boot time which system you would like to start.

  • Due to time constraints, the prebuilt images for Beta1 are only covering i386 and amd64; with the next beta, powerpc and sparc will follow (if you wish to test these architectures earlier, please build them yourself).

  • The new desktop artwork is not yet included.

  • The syslinux menu is still the old, prompt-based one. A freshly made new syslinux vgamenu using the official lenny desktop artwork is on the way (the same as d-i media will use in Lenny).

  • No live-installer included yet (if you wish to test live-installer earlier, please build it yourself).

  • No win32-loader included yet.

  • Sid packages used - At the time of building the live images, both live-helper 1.0.0-1 and live-initramfs 1.139.1-1 from sid were used. Since the latter has not yet migrated to testing, it was included manually as a local package. This is undesirable, as the release is supposed to be self-contained - however, it is just a convenient workaround as both were granted freeze exception and will migrate soon.

Plans for next Beta release

We are looking forward to upload Beta2 in about two weeks from now (maybefollowed by a third beta) with one final RC after that which should be identical to the final release.

Some more details about the open things we would like to address in Beta2 and later can be found at the wiki page.

The Debian Live team is still looking for more contributors for new features (post-lenny, though) as well as documentation writers for the manual (always). If you care about live systems, please join and help!

Thanks

Last but not least, our thanks goes to everyone who has contributed and to all maintainers that have kindly fixed live-specific bugs in their packages.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Fri, 07 Sep 2007

Debian Live Web Boot

Thanks to a patch from Mathieu Geli, live-initramfs as of version 1.99.1-1 supports a boot parameter called fetch.

That means, that it is enough to have a bootloader (syslinux, grub, whatever) and a kernel with the initrd image on a medium (cdrom, usb-stick, whatever) to boot a Debian Live system directly from the Internet or the local network without needing to setup a netboot environment (as in PXE). Just type: 

	live fetch=http://example.com/my_image.squashfs

at the boot prompt. Whithin the boot process of the live system, the squashfs image will be once downloaded into RAM. After that point, no network access is required anymore. This is also the reason why it was invented initially, it is an alternative to the conventional netboot (PXE with tftp for boot and shared root over a network filesystem such as cifs, nfs or smb) where permanent network access is required, not a replacement.

Temporary limitations

  • At the moment, the amount of RAM required to run a web booted live session is equal to the size of the squashfs image. Because squashfs compression is quite good, this is not so much of a problem on reasonably modern machines (512MB for a complete Xfce Debian desktop, 758MB for a complete GNOME or KDE Debian desktop system). Nevertheless, improvements to use a local swap partition to store the image are on the way (including caching and updating).

  • Due to a still pending move of the machine where live.debian.net is hosted, there are not yet autobuild squashfs images available. Later, you can just boot with something similar as: live fetch=http://live.debian.net/webboot/etch.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Thu, 19 Apr 2007

Debian Live and Google Summer of Code 2007

Debian is this year again part of Google's Summer of Code.

Last week, the final decisions about the proposed projects were made and Google granted 9 slots in total for Debian. I am very glad to say that Chris 'lamby' Lambs proposal for Debian Live is amongst those.

Here is the abstract from his proposal: 

	Live-helper is a utility to build CD, DVD, netboot and USB-stick live
	images of Debian, a GNU/Linux operating system. It boasts support for
	multiple architectures, auto-building images, amongst many other
	features.

	Live-helper is extremely flexible, allowing interested parties to create
	their own system completely specific to their needs, including support
	for custom package lists, kernel parameters, encryption, additional
	commands to configure the live system etc.

	My proposal is to construct a graphical user interface that can be used
	in conjunction with live-helper to build Debian Live systems, allowing
	editing of existing configurations and including a 'wizard'-style
	walkthrough for the first-time user.

	Providing less experienced users with the opportunity to easily create
	live distributions will generate more exposure for live-helper,
	providing more valuable feedback for its developers and ultimately
	helping Debian's image as an extremely flexible and free operating
	system.

	The GUI will be written in Python using the pygtk GTK+ bindings.

The next step on the timeline begins at May 28th, where the students start coding on their projects. I am happily looking forward to it.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Sat, 17 Feb 2007

Debian Live Encryption

In the past, the (compressed) filesystem image was always unencrypted. Thanks to a patch from Sebastien Raveau, live-package 0.9.22-1 and casper 1.81+debian-2 now supports encrypted live filesystems through loop-aes.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Sat, 10 Feb 2007

Debian Live USB

In the past, live-package was only able to build ISO images and netboot tarballs. Then, I added the 'usb' target and as of today, with live-package 0.99.20-1, all autobuild flavours are also available as images for USB memory sticks.

As before, the images can be downloaded from http://live.debian.net/.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Mon, 05 Feb 2007

Debian Live Autobuild

In the past, I uploaded manually new Debian Live images once or twice per month. Then, I setup a new server some weeks ago and as of today, the following flavours are now autobuilt weekly for testing and daily for unstable (currently i386 only):

  • debian-live-${DIST}-${ARCH}-standard

    only packages of priority standard or higher and a few live specific packages (eject, file and sudo).

  • debian-live-${DIST}-${ARCH}-gnome-desktop

    the standard system, laptop related packages (laptop task) and the GNOME desktop environment (desktop and gnome-desktop tasks).

  • debian-live-${DIST}-${ARCH}-kde-desktop

    the standard system, laptop related packages (laptop task) and the KDE desktop environment (desktop and kde-desktop tasks).

  • debian-live-${DIST}-${ARCH}-xfce-desktop

    the standard system, laptop related packages (laptop task) and the Xfce desktop environment (desktop and xfce-desktop tasks).

All images can be downloaded from http://live.debian.net/.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Tue, 28 Feb 2006

Re: Debian Live Resources

Phillip, my blog has no comments feature for similar reasons as madduck has pointed out.

As you may have read, I wrote "[Debian Live will be] first [an] unofficial [project], then trying to bring it into Debian and become an official subproject".

As you may have read too, Joey wrote "Debian Live [...] is an official sub-project of Debian".

I just created those resources on my own webserver for beeing quicker and more flexible in the beginning, I would be happy to move everything to debian.org. However, this would need a large amount of time for bureaucracy (especially for a poor little NM like me). Time, which I do not have and neither want to invest nor want to waste at the moment. If you volunteer for that job, feel free to be my guest (to avoid misunderstandings: alioth is not an option, hosting several ISO images is not possible on haydn due to lack of bandwith and space).

And yes, I agree... I am unworthy to run something officially because I am not a DD. I am patiently stuck in the queue since nearly a year, currently waiting on my AM who has the major PITA to check 75 packages... (my earnest and deepest sympathy to you, rene).

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Tue, 28 Feb 2006

Debian Live Resources

I just created the website, mailinglist, IRC channel, and the wiki. Feel free to join me.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Tue, 14 Feb 2006

Debian Live Initiative

I already got some feedback about the "device driver check CD"-thing. People got confused about it, so I will tell you a bit more about my intentions (although I wanted to start doing this not until next week, duuh).

What is wrong with current live systems?

There are already several Debian-based live systems and they are doing a great job. But, from the Debian perspective, most of them have one or more of the following disadvantages:

  • They are unofficial projects, developed outside of Debian.
  • They mix different distributions, e.g. testing and unstable.
  • They support i386 only.
  • They change package's behavior and/or appearance by stripping them down to save space.
  • They include unofficial packages.
  • They ship custom kernels with additional patches not part of Debian.
  • They are large and slow due to their sheer size and thus not suitable for rescue issues.
  • They are not available in different flavours, e.g. CDs, DVDs, USB-stick and netboot images

Why create our own live system?

Debian is the Universal Operating System: IMHO we should have an official live system for showing arround and to officially represent the true, one and only Debian system with the following main advantages:

  • It is an official Debian subproject.
  • It reflects the (current) state of one distribution.
  • It runs on as much architectures as possible.
  • It consists of unchanged Debian packages only.
  • It does not contain any unofficial package.
  • It uses an unaltered Debian kernel-image with no additional patches (except from live system specific ones which maybe required).

Creating the Debian Live framework

Such a life system framework would allow to create different images for different scenarios:

  • A small "base-system" for rescue purposes.
  • A normal "desktop-system" for demonstration purposes.
  • A special "diagnose-system" for device functionallity and detection purposes.

The last one is this "confusing" thing I mentioned before. Wouldn't it be nice to have a live system to easy detect hardware? Imagine, you could take such an image, burn it on a CD or copy it on a USB-stick, go to your hardware shop and boot it. Since this system would use only official Debian packages, you can easily verify if your favourite piece of hardware is supported by Debian. Doubts like "it runs with Knoppix, so hopefully it runs with Debian too" are history by that.

Maybe someone could implement then some sort of application which checks the hardware against Kenshis Debian GNU/Linux hardware compatibility list and displays some sort of report about the compatibility level of the tested hardware.

I will definitely work on that goal. But first, I have to do a bit of research about the best techniques and create the framework arround it...

Thanks to Myon for setting up the record live.debian.net.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link

Mon, 13 Feb 2006

Re: Device driver check CD

Roland, you are stealing my thunder! *grr*

Approximately three weeks ago, I decided to start the "Debian Live" initiative in my semester break - first unofficial, then trying to bring it into Debian and become an official subproject. One of the most important reason for me is having excately such a "device driver check CD"... However, today is the first day of my break and I will start working on it with the beginning of the next week.

/planet-debian-aggregator/debian-live permanent link