List of differences between standard and cloud systems
The goal of this page is to list the differences, and organise which and how to resolve them. Here, standard refers to Debian systems installed with DebianInstaller with the default settings, following the instructions in http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual.
Eventually, we should converge on a consensus that the remaining differences, if any, do not prevent us to claim that the cloud images are genuine Debian systems (706052).
Availability of installer source code
Standard systems are prepared with DebianInstaller, which is packaged in the Debian archive. TODO: check if the source code of all scripts used to prepare the binary images of DebianInstaller (install CDs, etc.) is also packaged.
AWS and GCE images are prepared with build-debian-cloud, to be packaged (693198). TODO: How about Azure images ?
Distribution Binary images
Debian does not distribute binary images of standard systems, but distributes installation media with a binary image of DebianInstaller.
- AWS, Azure and GCE images are available on the respective public clouds.
- Distribution of a generic cloud image in the debian archive is under discussion.
- TODO: How about the Debian live images ?
Contents (Stable systems)
Area
All: only the main area is enabled by default (not contrib or non-free).
Distribution
All: only the stable distribution is used. Discussions are under way (independantly for DebianInstaller and cloud images) to list stable backports by default (installation of backport packages will still be manual, but updates become automatic).
Kernel
- Default for standard and AWS.
- Custom for Azure and GCE.
- TODO: what is the kernel on Azure and in Debian live systems ?
Packages
Standard systems contain all packages installed by debootstrap, plus the ones installed by tasksel.
Cloud systems contain all the packages installed by debootstrap. Addition of extra packages such as less and psmisc are discussed in (696154). Addition of cloud-init from wheezy-backports is discussed on the mailing list.
- TODO: How about the Debian live images ?
Default account
- No default account name on standard images
admin on AWS
No default account name on GCE images (see https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/hello_world#ssh)
- TODO: how about Azure and Debian live images ?