Live manual

Live Systems

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Live Systems Manual

About the Live Systems Project

2. About the Live Systems Project

2.1 Motivation

2.1.1 What is wrong with current live systems

When Live Systems Project was initiated, there were already several Debian based live systems available and they are doing a great job. From the Debian perspective most of them have one or more of the following disadvantages:

2.1.2 Why create our own live system?

Debian is the Universal Operating System: Debian has a live system to show around and to accurately represent the Debian system with the following main advantages:

2.2 Philosophy

2.2.1 Only unchanged packages from Debian "main"

We will only use packages from the Debian repository in the "main" section. The non-free section is not part of Debian and therefore cannot be used for official live system images.

We will not change any packages. Whenever we need to change something, we will do that in coordination with its package maintainer in Debian.

As an exception, our own packages such as live-boot, live-build or live-config may temporarily be used from our own repository for development reasons (e.g. to create development snapshots). They will be uploaded to Debian on a regular basis.

2.2.2 No package configuration of the live system

In this phase we will not ship or install sample or alternative configurations. All packages are used in their default configuration as they are after a regular installation of Debian.

Whenever we need a different default configuration, we will do that in coordination with its package maintainer in Debian.

A system for configuring packages is provided using debconf allowing custom configured packages to be installed in your custom produced live system images, but for the prebuilt live images we choose to leave packages in their default configuration, unless absolutely necessary in order to work in the live environment. Wherever possible, we prefer to adapt packages within the Debian archive to work better in a live system versus making changes to the live toolchain or prebuilt image configurations. For more information, please see Customization overview.

2.3 Contact


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