Debian Live Handbuch

Über Debian Live

1. Über dieses Handbuch

1.1 Begriffe
1.2 Autoren
1.3 Contributing to this document
1.3.1 Applying changes
1.3.2 Translation

2. About the Debian Live Project

2.1 Motivation
2.1.1 What is wrong with current live systems
2.1.2 Why create our own live system?
2.2 Philosophy
2.2.1 Only unchanged packages from Debian "main"
2.2.2 No package configuration of the live system
2.3 Contact

Benutzer

3. Installation

3.1 Requirements
3.2 Installing live-build
3.2.1 From the Debian repository
3.2.2 From source
3.2.3 From 'snapshots'
3.3 Installing live-boot and live-config
3.3.1 From the Debian repository
3.3.2 From source
3.3.3 From 'snapshots'

4. The basics

4.1 What is a live system?
4.2 First steps: building an ISO hybrid image
4.3 Using an ISO hybrid live image
4.3.1 Burning an ISO image to a physical medium
4.3.2 Copying an ISO hybrid image to a USB stick
4.3.3 Booting the live media
4.4 Using a virtual machine for testing
4.4.1 Testing an ISO image with QEMU
4.4.2 Testing an ISO image with virtualbox-ose
4.5 Building an HDD image
4.6 Using an HDD image
4.6.1 Testing an HDD image with Qemu
4.6.2 Using the space left on a USB stick
4.7 Building a netboot image
4.7.1 DHCP server
4.7.2 TFTP server
4.7.3 NFS server
4.7.4 Netboot testing HowTo
4.7.5 Qemu
4.7.6 VMWare Player

5. Overview of tools

5.1 The live-build package
5.1.1 The lb config command
5.1.2 The lb build command
5.1.3 The lb clean command
5.2 The live-boot package
5.3 The live-config package

6. Managing a configuration

6.1 Use auto to manage configuration changes
6.2 Example auto scripts

7. Customization overview

7.1 Build time vs. boot time configuration
7.2 Stages of the build
7.3 Supplement lb config with files
7.4 Customization tasks

8. Customizing package installation

8.1 Package sources
8.1.1 Distribution, archive areas and mode
8.1.2 Distribution mirrors
8.1.3 Distribution mirrors used at build time
8.1.4 Distribution mirrors used at run time
8.1.5 Additional repositories
8.2 Choosing packages to install
8.2.1 Package lists
8.2.2 Predefined package lists
8.2.3 Local package lists
8.2.4 Local binary package lists
8.2.5 Extending a provided package list using includes
8.2.6 Using conditionals inside package lists
8.2.7 Tasks
8.2.8 Desktop and language tasks
8.3 Installing modified or third-party packages
8.3.1 Using packages.chroot to install custom packages
8.3.2 Using an APT repository to install custom packages
8.3.3 Custom packages and APT
8.4 Configuring APT at build time
8.4.1 Choosing apt or aptitude
8.4.2 Using a proxy with APT
8.4.3 Tweaking APT to save space
8.4.4 Passing options to apt or aptitude
8.4.5 APT pinning

9. Customizing contents

9.1 Includes
9.1.1 Live/chroot local includes
9.1.2 Binary local includes
9.1.3 Binary includes
9.2 Hooks
9.2.1 Live/chroot local hooks
9.2.2 Boot-time hooks
9.2.3 Binary local hooks
9.3 Preseeding Debconf questions

10. Customizing run time behaviours

10.1 Customizing the live user
10.2 Customizing locale and language
10.3 Persistence
10.3.1 The live-persistence.conf file
10.3.2 Persistence SubText

11. Customizing the binary image

11.1 Bootloader
11.2 ISO metadata

12. Customizing Debian Installer

12.1 Types of Debian Installer
12.2 Customizing Debian Installer by preseeding
12.3 Customizing Debian Installer content

Projekt

13. Reporting bugs

13.1 Known issues
13.2 Rebuild from scratch
13.3 Use up-to-date packages
13.4 Collect information
13.5 Isolate the failing case if possible
13.6 Use the correct package to report the bug against
13.6.1 At build time whilst bootstrapping
13.6.2 At build time whilst installing packages
13.6.3 At boot time
13.6.4 At run time
13.7 Do the research
13.8 Where to report bugs

14. Coding Style

14.1 Compatibility
14.2 Indenting
14.3 Wrapping
14.4 Variables
14.5 Miscellaneous

15. Procedures

15.1 Udeb Uploads
15.2 Major Releases
15.3 Point Releases
15.3.1 Last Point Release of a Debian Release
15.3.2 Point release announcement template

Beispiele

16. Examples

16.1 Using the examples
16.2 Tutorial 1: A standard image
16.3 Tutorial 2: A web browser utility
16.4 Tutorial 3: A personalized image
16.4.1 First revision
16.4.2 Second revision
16.5 A VNC Kiosk Client
16.6 A base image for a 128M USB key
16.7 A localized KDE desktop and installer

Anhang

17. Style guide

17.1 Guidelines for authors
17.1.1 Linguistic features
17.1.2 Procedures
17.2 Guidelines for translators
17.2.1 Translation hints

Debian Live Handbuch

Benutzer

11. Customizing the binary image

11.1 Bootloader

live-build uses syslinux and some of its derivatives (depending on the image type) as bootloaders by default. You can easily customize them in a number of ways that range from providing a full theme to changing the boot timeout or simply adding a personalized splash image. Some of the following examples of customization make use of different methods, like includes or hooks.

If you want to use a full theme you can specify the --syslinux-theme option (see man lb_config). live-build will then retrieve the theme from the mirror and install it.

Imagine that you want to build a progress client but you prefer to include the server's theme because you want to have the help menu. Then you would launch lb config as follows:

$ lb config --mode progress --syslinux-theme progress-server

You can also create your own theme or modify an already existing one and if you do not have a mirror, you can add the package to config/packages.chroot. In this case it is not necessary to specify any option.

There is also the possibility of making smaller changes. For instance, syslinux derivatives are configured by default with a timeout of 0 (zero) which means that they will pause indefinitely at their splash screen until you press a key.

To modify the boot timeout of a default iso-hybrid image you can edit a default isolinux.cfg file specifying the timeout in units of seconds and add it to config/includes.binary/isolinux/

A modified isolinux.cfg to boot after five seconds would be similar to this:

include menu.cfg
default vesamenu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 50

An alternative way of achieving the same goal could be writing a hook and adding it to config/hooks/ Remember to add the .binary suffix to run in the binary stage. A proposed example:

#!/bin/sh

sed -i 's|timeout 0|timeout 50|' binary/isolinux/isolinux.cfg

Likewise, if you want to use a personalized splash.png image you can add a picture of 640x480 pixels to config/includes.binary/isolinux/

11.2 ISO metadata

When creating an ISO9660 binary image, you can use the following options to add various textual metadata for your image. This can help you easily identify the version or configuration of an image without booting it.

  • LB_ISO_APPLICATION/--iso-application NAME: This should describe the application that will be on the image. The maximum length for this field is 128 characters.
  • LB_ISO_PREPARER/--iso-preparer NAME: This should describe the preparer of the image, usually with some contact details. The default for this option is the live-build version you are using, which may help with debugging later. The maximum length for this field is 128 characters.
  • LB_ISO_PUBLISHER/--iso-publisher NAME: This should describe the publisher of the image, usually with some contact details. The maximum length for this field is 128 characters.
  • LB_ISO_VOLUME/--iso-volume NAME: This should specify the volume ID of the image. This is used as a user-visible label on some platforms such as Windows and Apple Mac OS. The maximum length for this field is 32 characters.