Live manual

Live Systems


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Live Systems Manual

About

About this manual

1. About this manual

1.1 For the impatient
1.2 Terms
1.3 Authors
1.4 Contributing to this document
1.4.1 Applying changes
1.4.2 Translation

About the Live Systems Project

2. About the Live Systems 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

User

Installation

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'

The basics

4. The basics

4.1 What is a live system?
4.2 Downloading prebuilt images
4.3 Using the web live image builder
4.3.1 Web builder usage and caveats
4.4 First steps: building an ISO hybrid image
4.5 Using an ISO hybrid live image
4.5.1 Burning an ISO image to a physical medium
4.5.2 Copying an ISO hybrid image to a USB stick
4.5.3 Using the space left on a USB stick
4.5.4 Booting the live medium
4.6 Using a virtual machine for testing
4.6.1 Testing an ISO image with QEMU
4.6.2 Testing an ISO image with VirtualBox
4.7 Building and using an HDD image
4.8 Building a netboot image
4.8.1 DHCP server
4.8.2 TFTP server
4.8.3 NFS server
4.8.4 Netboot testing HowTo
4.8.5 Qemu
4.9 Webbooting
4.9.1 Getting the webboot files
4.9.2 Booting webboot images

Overview of tools

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

Managing a configuration

6. Managing a configuration

6.1 Dealing with configuration changes
6.1.1 Why use auto scripts? What do they do?
6.1.2 Use example auto scripts
6.2 Clone a configuration published via Git

Customizing contents

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

Customizing package installation

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 Using metapackages
8.2.3 Local package lists
8.2.4 Local binary package lists
8.2.5 Generated package lists
8.2.6 Using conditionals inside package lists
8.2.7 Removing packages at install time
8.2.8 Desktop and language tasks
8.2.9 Kernel flavour and version
8.2.10 Custom kernels
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

Customizing contents

9. Customizing contents

9.1 Includes
9.1.1 Live/chroot local includes
9.1.2 Binary local 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

Customizing run time behaviours

10. Customizing run time behaviours

10.1 Customizing the live user
10.2 Customizing locale and language
10.3 Persistence
10.3.1 The persistence.conf file
10.3.2 Using more than one persistence store
10.3.3 Using persistence with encryption

Customizing the binary image

11. Customizing the binary image

11.1 Bootloaders
11.2 ISO metadata

Customizing Debian Installer

12. Customizing Debian Installer

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

Project

Contributing to the project

13. Contributing to the project

13.1 Making changes

Reporting bugs

14. Reporting bugs

14.1 Known issues
14.2 Rebuild from scratch
14.3 Use up-to-date packages
14.4 Collect information
14.5 Isolate the failing case if possible
14.6 Use the correct package to report the bug against
14.6.1 At build time while bootstrapping
14.6.2 At build time while installing packages
14.6.3 At boot time
14.6.4 At run time
14.7 Do the research
14.8 Where to report bugs

Coding Style

15. Coding Style

15.1 Compatibility
15.2 Indenting
15.3 Wrapping
15.4 Variables
15.5 Miscellaneous

Procedures

16. Procedures

16.1 Major Releases
16.2 Point Releases
16.2.1 Last Point Release of a Debian Release
16.2.2 Point release announcement template

Git repositories

17. Git repositories

17.1 Handling multiple repositories

Examples

Examples

18. Examples

18.1 Using the examples
18.2 Tutorial 1: A default image
18.3 Tutorial 2: A web browser utility
18.4 Tutorial 3: A personalized image
18.4.1 First revision
18.4.2 Second revision
18.5 A VNC Kiosk Client
18.6 A base image for a 128MB USB key
18.7 A localized GNOME desktop and installer

Appendix

Style guide

19. Style guide

19.1 Guidelines for authors
19.1.1 Linguistic features
19.1.2 Procedures
19.2 Guidelines for translators
19.2.1 Translation hints

Metadata

SiSU Metadata, document information

Live Systems Manual

Installation

3. Installation

3.1 Requirements

Building live system images has very few system requirements:

Note that using Debian or a Debian-derived distribution is not required - live-build will run on almost any distribution with the above requirements.

3.2 Installing live-build

You can install live-build in a number of different ways:

If you are using Debian, the recommended way is to install live-build via the Debian repository.

3.2.1 From the Debian repository

Simply install live-build like any other package:

# apt-get install live-build

3.2.2 From source

live-build is developed using the Git version control system. On Debian based systems, this is provided by the git package. To check out the latest code, execute:

$ git clone git://live-systems.org/git/live-build.git

You can build and install your own Debian package by executing:

$ cd live-build
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us
$ cd ..

Now install whichever of the freshly built .deb files you were interested in, e.g.

# dpkg -i live-build_4.0-1_all.deb

You can also install live-build directly to your system by executing:

# make install

and uninstall it with:

# make uninstall

3.2.3 From 'snapshots'

If you do not wish to build or install live-build from source, you can use snapshots. These are built automatically from the latest version in Git and are available on ‹http://live-systems.org/debian/›.

3.3 Installing live-boot and live-config

Note: You do not need to install live-boot or live-config on your system to create customized live systems. However, doing so will do no harm and is useful for reference purposes. If you only want the documentation, you may now install the live-boot-doc and live-config-doc packages separately.

3.3.1 From the Debian repository

Both live-boot and live-config are available from the Debian repository as per Installing live-build.

3.3.2 From source

To use the latest source from git, you can follow the process below. Please ensure you are familiar with the terms mentioned in Terms.

$ git clone git://live-systems.org/git/live-boot.git
$ git clone git://live-systems.org/git/live-config.git

Consult the live-boot and live-config man pages for details on customizing if that is your reason for building these packages from source.

You must build either on your target distribution or in a chroot containing your target platform: this means if your target is buster then you should build against buster.

Use a personal builder such as pbuilder or sbuild if you need to build live-boot for a target distribution that differs from your build system. For example, for buster live images, build live-boot in a buster chroot. If your target distribution happens to match your build system distribution, you may build directly on the build system using dpkg-buildpackage (provided by the dpkg-dev package):

$ cd live-boot
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us
$ cd ../live-config
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us

As live-boot and live-config are installed by live-build system, installing the packages in the host system is not sufficient: you should treat the generated .deb files like any other custom packages. Since your purpose for building from source is likely to test new things over the short term before the official release, follow Installing modified or third-party packages to temporarily include the relevant files in your configuration. In particular, notice that both packages are divided into a generic part, a documentation part and one or more back-ends. Include the generic part, only one back-end matching your configuration, and optionally the documentation. Assuming you are building a live image in the current directory and have generated all .deb files for a single version of both packages in the directory above, these bash commands would copy all of the relevant packages including default back-ends:

$ cp ../live-boot{_,-initramfs-tools,-doc}*.deb  config/packages.chroot/
$ cp ../live-config{_,-sysvinit,-doc}*.deb  config/packages.chroot/

3.3.3 From 'snapshots'

You can let live-build automatically use the latest snapshots of live-boot and live-config by configuring the package repository on live-systems.org as a third-party repository in your live-build configuration directory.



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