This is a collaborative wiki to gather information and to discuss technologies used to produce a complex framework to enable production of official Debian Live systems1, that uses as much as possible official Debian packages and, for optional hard disk installation, the DebianInstaller.
A Debian Live system is a copy of Debian that can be booted directly from removable media (CD-ROMs, DVDs, USB keys) or from another computer over the network. This allows you to install Debian just once, and subsequently boot it on one or more different machines.
The development process defined the key technologies to implement the rootfs generation and the whole image generation (lh_build).
Key technologies adopted so far includes a Debian version2 of now live-initramfs (DebianLive/live-initramfs) from Ubuntu to implement initramfs generation and boot time configuration of readonly rootfs (squashfs, ext2 and plain directory3) made writable by a unions (unionfs) with a ramdisk or customizable writable fs.
Resources for information is http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/ and to discuss are this wiki, the IRC channel #debian-live at oftc ( irc://irc.oftc.net/#debian-live/ ) and the mailing list.
User
DebianLive/Beryl - the fancy 3D desktop with your live
DebianLive/Howto/USB memory stick.
DebianLive/Howto/Persistence for USB key live system.
DebianLive/Howto/Custom Install Do a custom install for the Debian Live OS on a disc or any FLASH memory.
DebianLive/Howto/Network Image Server - netboot, PXE
DebianLive/Howto/Customising Using QEMU - Customising Debian live image using QEMU networking to transfer modified files.
DebianLive/Howto/Xen - Guide for building a live Xen system
DebianLive/Howto/Cache Packages - reduce the time spent downloading deb packages
DebianLive/HowTo/SmallSizeImage - reduce the live system size
DebianLive/Debian Mirror Simple Howto
DebianLive/Webconverger - a Web live system
Developer
Project
Other pages (unsupported)
english
DebianLive/Fromhd - to boot from a compressed image on the hard drive.
DebianLive/HdInstallation - install DebianLive onto a Hard disk, using DebianInstall.
DebianLive/HelperTree - a map of the lh_* scripts and their depends.
Debian_Live definition
german
german translation (work in progress)
http://www.linux-magazin.de/online_artikel/workshop_debian_live_system_mit_etch article in linux-magazin.de