Boxer
Boxer is a tool for system deployment and for composing blend, i.e designing how to have a distribution unfold onto boxes.
Boxer is used to maintain the Debian Pure Blends DebianParl and ?DebianDesign.
Goal of Boxer is to encourage reuse of customizations, and to ease (re)integration with Debian. Ideally override files and scripts are used only to speedup development, then integrated into official Debian packages, and the final product uses only package lists and debconf, a.k.a. a Debian Pure Blend!
Installation
Stable data & tool
Stable release of boxer, available in Jessie, is adequate for some compositions:
sudo apt-get install boxer
Newer tool
Newer release of boxer is recommended for new projects - even for composing stable target systems.
Add the following to your APT source list:
deb http://debian.jones.dk/ wheezy boxer
(replace "wheezy" to your suite name as needed).
Newest data
Newest dataset is usable also with Jessie boxer tool:
sudo apt-get install boxer git make shtool git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/git/boxer/boxer-data make -C boxer-data
Use
2. Create a boxer node, and have boxer compose an install profile:
cat <<EOF >mydata/myblend.yml classes: - Desktop.xfce - Desktop.email - Desktop.web EOF boxer compose --nodedir mydata myblend
3. Deploy your custom Debian system, in one of several ways:
Using debian-installer with the preseed.cfg file
Install a minimal Debian, log into it as root, and execute the script.sh
Newer tool
Recommended - even for stable target system - is to compose on a development system.
Development
We use Alioth with a mailinglist.
Code and default dataset is developed separately:
git clone git://git.debian.org/boxer/Boxer git clone git://git.debian.org/boxer/boxer-data
Code is released to CPAN and packaged in the Perl team:
git clone git.debian.org:/git/pkg-perl/packages/boxer