Hi Daniel, I'll let Ikey go through the details.Build time: It's manual. We installed Debian Testing on a partition (same way a user would), then we rsync all the files into a directory, we chroot it and we install the packages needed to make it a live system. We add Gnome and a few other things, we squashfs it, we extract the initrd, we add our isolinux and we end up with something similar than the structure of the Ubuntu liveCD. After that we use our remastering tool (mintconstructor) to modify the ISO incrementally.
Run time: As far as I know the live-config packages didn't work well for us with Debian Testing, so we're using the older version of live-initramfs. It's a simple matter of giving it some config data (username, hostname..etc). We're also using LZMA for initrd, as opposed to Gzip... and Ikey could confirm, but I think Debian's live-initramfs fails to create the live user at run-time, so we're basically creating it ourselves, and the installer takes care of its deletion post-install.
Install time: We noted that there was a hook for a live-installer.desktop file, so we're providing one with our installer, which we conveniently named live-installer. The source code is really straight forward and I'm sure we'll soon work together on this via github. It's a basic installer, it asks questions, mounts targets, formats them, copies files from the squashfs, sets up the locale/keyboard/user..etc, removes itself (btw ikey, it doesn't remove its slideshow atm)..etc.
Source for the installer: http://github.com/linuxmint/live-installer Debs: http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Debian Regards, Clement Lefebvre Linux Mint On 15/09/10 10:18, Daniel Baumann wrote:
On 09/14/2010 08:20 PM, Ikey Doherty wrote:I'll also agree there that cooperation with the Debian Live team would be beneficial to both projects.absolutely. as far as i can see, there are three major topics here: * build time: how do you build your system images, with what tools and what workflow. * run time: how does your live system boot, and what does it do at boot time to configure itself for those things that can't be decided at build time. * install time: how do you install your live system. it would be very nice if you could write a short introduction mail to debian-live@lists.debian.org covering those three things briefly, with an url to the latest (development?) image for download. we'd then go on from that, describe what we do different, and find out were we can converge. Regards, Daniel