The first Debian Lenny live CDs (beta)

From: Daniel Baumann <daniel-AT-debian.org> To: debian-devel-announce-AT-lists.debian.org Subject: Debian Live Lenny Beta1 Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:35 +0200 Message-ID: <48B54F7B.5030603@debian.org> Cc: debian-live-devel-AT-lists.alioth.debian.org, debian-user-AT-lists.debian.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Debian Live Lenny Beta1 ======================= The Debian Live team[0] 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[1] to make Debian's own[2] 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[3] (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[4], a collection of shell scripts that allow us to automate and customize this process. Considerable care[5] is taken to ensure that the resulting live system is not tainted by the host system and that installed packages are not modified more than 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[6] directly. Live Magic - ---------- Live Magic[7] 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[8] 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[9]. 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[10]! Thanks ====== Last but not least, our thanks goes to everyone who has contributed[11] and to all maintainers that have kindly fixed live-specific bugs in their packages. References ========== [0] http://alioth.debian.org/project/memberlist.php?group_id=... [1] http://git.debian.net/?p=live-helper.git;a=blob;f=docs/NEWS [2] http://blog.daniel-baumann.ch/2006/02/14#20060214_debian-... [3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/live-initramfs [4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/live-helper [5] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/Guidelines [6] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-live-deve... [7] http://packages.qa.debian.org/live-magic [8] http://packages.qa.debian.org/live-installer [9] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/Lenny/Todo#Beta2 [10] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/Contribute [11] http://git.debian.net/?p=live-helper.git;a=blob;f=docs/CR... http://git.debian.net/?p=live-initramfs.git;a=blob;f=docs... Regards, Daniel - -- Address: Daniel Baumann, Burgunderstrasse 3, CH-4562 Biberist Email: daniel.baumann@panthera-systems.net Internet: http://people.panthera-systems.net/~daniel-baumann/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAki1T3oACgkQ+C5cwEsrK56l3QCgzdHkxT+UA+ko3KFq/q3kPfEr VzsAnjDDV00H7xtVq/BNFTC5MrGojFeA =kYJd -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-announce-REQUEST@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org