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 * Plans are afoot for more than a simple demo live image. [[DebianEeePC/Live|Live-user]] will have more packages installed and optimised for the eee series.  * Plans are afoot for more than a simple demo live image. [[DebianEeePC/Live-User|Live-User]] will have more packages installed and optimised for the eee series.

Translations: ?French

A Debian live demo for the Eee PC

Introduction & Status

Eeepc-live is a DebianLive based live demo system.

Version 1.0~b1 should work both over ethernet and wifi with all models.

Features

  • A bootable .img that can be put on an SD card or USB device using dd.
  • Small image size, suitable for use on 256M USB keys.
  • Lenny + 2.6.29 kernel so that all ethernet + wifi in all models are supported.
  • Lightweight, LXDE-based desktop.

Future

  • Other flavours are planned: minimal, rescue, gnome, kde.
  • We also plan to add an installer. Until that is delivered, use the one on DebianEeePC/HowTo/Install instead.

  • Plans are afoot for more than a simple demo live image. ?Live-User will have more packages installed and optimised for the eee series.

Download

USB/HDD images

See Changelog.

eeepc-live-1.0~b1.img (~213M)

bootable USB

eeepc-live-1.0~b1.img.md5

the md5sum of the .img to verify download integrity

eeepc-live-1.0~b1.list

the list of files included in the .img

eeepc-live-1.0~b1.packages

the list of packages included in the .img

Source

The source code repository for the live-helper config is at http://git.debian.org/?p=debian-eeepc/eeepc-live.git;a=summary

The source for the image is available as well.

eeepc-live-1.0~b1.tar.gz (~781M)

the complete source tarball for the binary .img

eeepc-live-1.0~b1.tar.gz.md5

the md5sum of the tarball to verify download integrity

eeepc-live-1.0~b1.source.list

the list of files in the tarball

Testing the image

Just dd the .img file to a USB key or SD card (assuming the USB device is /dev/sdc -- replace this with the actual device*) which will replace its entire contents with this image:

dd if=eeepc-live-1.0~b1.img of=/dev/sdc
sync

Notes:

  • If you don't know which device your USB key or SD card is, you can look for it in /dev/disk/by-id/ (assuming your system has udev).
  • Make sure that no filesystems on the device are mounted when you do the dd. Your system may automount any detected filesystems. Check 'df' to ensure none are mounted and 'umount' each one that is. If you fail to do this, the copy you make to the device with dd will probably end up corrupted and unbootable.

The best way to test the image is on the hardware itself. Just insert the key or card, reboot, press the 'esc' key during the BIOS splash screen, and when the boot device menu is shown, select the key or card to boot from.

Testing the image in QEMU is useful in a limited way. Of course, none of the hardware-specific stuff will work. However, you can check that the rest of the live system works correctly.

Here is the ?DebianEeePC/Live/UsersGuide.

Development

Building the image

We recommend you use a deb caching proxy like 'approx' if you're going to be building a lot of live-helper images from the supplied conf. That way, you will not re-download the package files each time you do a new build (though live-helper itself does some caching; still, sometimes you need to lh_config --purge which deletes this cache, so using approx will help here).

To use the proxy, you'll need to configure it properly on your build host and then adjust the archive URL in ./config/bootstrap to point at your proxy URL (e.g. "deb http://192.168.1.2:9999/debian lenny main contrib"). Likewise, you can use the proxy for our custom repo in ./config/chroot_sources/eeepc.chroot.

Building the image is then as simple as the following. We assume a sid build system; lenny/etch will work too, but then you should use the live-helper from sid and a backport of cdebootstrap if you use etch.

sudo apt-get install cdebootstrap live-helper git-core
git clone git://git.debian.org/git/debian-eeepc/eeepc-live.git
cd eeepc-live
sudo lh_build 2>&1 | tee build.log

When you're done you should have a binary.img and build.log will contain the log of the build in case of errors. Test your new image as per above.

Using development versions of packages

Note: sometimes latest versions of packages from sid/git may be needed to build correctly. In particular, eeepc-acpi-scripts 1.1.0-1 and acpid 1.0.8-7 need to be downloaded and copied into config/chroot_local-packages/ before running lh_build.

Developing the live config

For each change to ./config you should sudo lh_clean before doing another lh_build (although depending on what you changed, lh_clean options such as --binary or --purge may be more appropriate).

When making changes to the image, don't manually change the files outside of ./config (e.g. ./chroot) as they are generated files and will be cleaned up by lh_clean. You may find it instructive to create a new directory and run 'lh_config' in it to generate a default live-helper config. Then diff -r the default config tree with eeepc-live/config to see what we've done to customize it.

For more help on developing this live config, see #debian-eeepc @ irc.oftc.net or use our mailing list.