A Debian live demo & installer for the Eee PC
?TableOfContents
Translations: [:DebianEeePCFrench/Live:French]
Introduction & Status
Eeepc-live is a [:DebianLive] based live demo system including an installer. Because it is in alpha stage of development, it is primarily of interest at this time only to developers and testers. It does not yet include a very useful desktop, as our focus is first on infrastructure and basic functionality before we start adding applications.
Work currently in progress
- The network setup hooks don't work yet. You need to manually configure wireless to get a connection.
- The installer is not our custom installer yet; this will require changes to live-helper itself to support.
- More packages are installed than are needed; we need to figure out how to pare down the xorg packages to only the required few for the Eee (core packages + intel, keyboard, synaptics touchpad drivers).
Future
In future releases, the system will include a small a selection of [:DebianEeePC/Software] to demonstrate a minimal yet functional Debian desktop, well suited to the capabilities of the Eee PC.
Download
USB/HDD images
[http://people.debian.org/~synrg/debian-eeepc/eeepc-live/eeepc-live-1.0~a5.img eeepc-live-1.0~a5.img] |
the complete binary.img produced by lh_build |
[http://people.debian.org/~synrg/debian-eeepc/eeepc-live/eeepc-live-1.0~a5.img.md5 eeepc-live-1.0~a5.img.md5] |
the md5sum of the above .img to verify download integrity |
[http://people.debian.org/~synrg/debian-eeepc/eeepc-live/eeepc-live-minimal.img eeepc-live-minimal.img] |
a minimal, console-only flavour suitable for backup/rescue |
[http://people.debian.org/~synrg/debian-eeepc/eeepc-live/eeepc-live-minimal.img.md5 eeepc-live-minimal.img.md5] |
the md5sum of the above .img to verify download integrity |
Source
[http://people.debian.org/~synrg/debian-eeepc/eeepc-live/eeepc-live-1.0~a4.tar.gz eeepc-live-1.0~a4.tar.gz] |
the debian-live config used to build the .img |
Repository
The source code repository is at http://git.debian.org/?p=debian-eeepc/eeepc-live.git;a=summary
Testing the image
Some USB keys will not boot on the Eee if you dd the .img to the key. Instead, make a 'superfloppy' image containing just the partition, e.g.
dd if=eeepc-live-1.0~a4.img of=eeepc-live-1.0~a4.part.img bs=512 skip=1
Then dd this image (assuming your USB key device is /dev/sdc):
dd if=eeepc-live-1.0~a3.part.img of=/dev/sdc
Note: We used /sbin/fdisk -ul on the image to verify that the partition starts at block 1 and blocks are 512 bytes long; this may change from one release to the next.
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.
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 tar -xzf eeepc-live-1.0~a3.tar.gz cd eeepc-live-1.0~a3 script build.log sudo lh_build exit # leave 'script'
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.
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.