A Debian live demo & installer for the Eee PC

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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

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.