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Do live Debian images have a future?

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GarryRicketson
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Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#16 Post by GarryRicketson »

by dasein »But given how badly the last external maintainer was treated, whodafugg would volunteer for that gig?
This is a good point, and it might make one wonder , what else will be next.

I am in agreement with Steve McIntyre, I think that is the point he is trying
to make, unless some one the really cares enough about maintaining some
kind of "Live images", then there is no reason to continue it, when there seems
to be very few people that even use them.
The link ruffwoof posted, it is hard to spot the way he posted it, just the word "this" :
Post by ruffwoof » 2017-06-26 13:55
What with this along ----snip---
"this" links to this ,below. It should be noted it was 2 years ago:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-live/20 ... 00024.html
From >> Daniel Baumann[ I don't know why this post is not showing up on planet.debian.org:
https://danieltmp.wordpress.com/2015/11 ... bian-live/
I am sending it here by mail now. ]
I don't think Steve McIntyre, is really to blame,
https://lists.debian.org/debian-live/20 ... 00025.html


An abrupt End to Debian Live
----------------------------

Debian can be great.

But depending on who you are, where you come from, and who your friends
are, Debian can also be hateful and full of deceit.

Before even more of reality[0] is spin-doctored into some distorted[1]
view of it, and before my past work is being discredited, I will take
the high road and continue my work on Debian Live images on the outside.

If there is one thing I did learn over the past years of agressions
towards me, then that it is this: I am forced to blindly and
unchallenged accept everything others decide about me or my work,
resistence to the cabal is futile, anything goes, no[2] matter[3] what[4].

Therefore, after having founded Debian Live back in 2006 and having by
now almost 10 years continuously worked on it, without further ado:

Debian Live is dead, hijacked by the debian-cd and the
debian-installer Teams[5]

The live.debian.net server will be shut down end of month, the Git
repositories are read-only as of now and mirrored to GitHub[6] for archival.

So long, and thanks for all the fish[7].

Daniel

[0] https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/08/
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-live/20 ... 00008.html
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/497471
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/759189
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/754910
[5] https://bugs.debian.org/804315
[6] https://github.com/debian-live
[7] http://live.debian.net/project/downstream/
=================================
by dasein »So unless someone convinces this guy to grow up, it looks like Debian will lose its Live image presence.
In my communications with him , he responded in a mature sensible way, and promptly, as well as politely, unlike some of the others , but that is another
topic, and it really does not do any good blaming any one individual, teams are teams, and there are several persons invloved, with that said,... this (below)
is another mail list message, from 2 years ago.
To: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-technologies.com>
Cc: formorer@debian.org, debian-live@lists.debian.org
Subject: debian-live Alioth project
From: "Iain R. Learmonth" <irl@debian.org>
=========================
Hi Daniel,

As part of the process of integrating the live systems better into the
Debian Organisation, we would like to host the sources for live-* packages
on Alioth where it is easier for others in the Debian project to contribute
code, documentation and translations.

We would also like to move any web content to either webwml or to being
hosted on Alioth where webwml is not appropriate.

Please accept my request to join the Alioth project and set me to have
administrator rights for the project so I can process new member requests,
configure mailing lists and configure the VCS.

Thanks,
Iain.
Any way, in a nut shell, the few people that feel they really need Live Images,
Debian, or what ever, are going to need to learn how to
1. Do their own searches,
2.Maybe learn how to make their own live image, and customize it
to fit their needs.
3. Or get involved with the Debian Developers, and volunteer to take this on
someone probably will, but it kind of jumps back to this:
But given how badly the last external maintainer was treated, whodafugg would volunteer for that gig?
There really will all ways be uses and future for Debian Live images, but
they may not be easily available, or the future is "roll your own" so to speak.
Personally, I have no use for the newest ones, Debian 8 and 9, I have very good
ones that were made from Debian 6 and 7, and those are all I need.
Guess that is all for now.
P.S. A little search foo, and one can find not only some excellent Linux live images, but tutorials on making them, it can be done using your Debian system,
as well as other distros, and also there are some "ready made" ones available.
The MX live images images also work very well.
They are based on Debian, so that is a very good option.
--- sorry, for any spelling or other mistakes, I have to run, and have not yet
"previewd" or proof read my post
Last edited by GarryRicketson on 2017-06-28 22:52, edited 1 time in total.

Kryten
Posts: 36
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Location: Scotland

Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#17 Post by Kryten »

My introduction to debian was via a live disk ,so would be sad to see it go.
Dont think i would have tried debian without it.
Didnt come across any major problems with the Jessie live install or ubuntu live disks that ive tried in the past.
Hope that debian live images does have a future and i appreciate the work that goes into making them.

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GarryRicketson
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Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#18 Post by GarryRicketson »

Thanks, I do think it is a important part and important that Debian offers
a way that people wanting to "sample" or just try Debian for their first time.
On all the distros I have tried, if there had not been a live CD image, it is very
unlikely I would have tried them.
It is a valuable promotional medium to offer Live images, as well as something
that can be used as a utility or tool, if and when needed.

Bulkley
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Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#19 Post by Bulkley »

GarryRicketson wrote:On all the distros I have tried, if there had not been a live CD image, it is very
unlikely I would have tried them.
+1. There is an alternative. One can try a distro on a virtual machine.

MALsPa
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Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#20 Post by MALsPa »

GarryRicketson wrote:Thanks, I do think it is a important part and important that Debian offers
a way that people wanting to "sample" or just try Debian for their first time.
On all the distros I have tried, if there had not been a live CD image, it is very
unlikely I would have tried them.
It is a valuable promotional medium to offer Live images, as well as something
that can be used as a utility or tool, if and when needed.
I agree. A lot of the distros I've tried, it was because they were Debian derivatives that had Debian repos in the sources.list, and because they had live/install images when Debian didn't. I was elated when I found out about the now-deceased Debian Live Project; later, I was even happier when I found "official" Debian live/install images.

In some situations, like when I wasn't sure how Debian would work out on a particular computer, I'd download some other distro's live/install iso instead, because it was just a little too much trouble to install Debian just for testing.

Well, either way, I'll keep using Debian, just as I have been for all these years. But having good live/install images available does make things nicer for me.

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Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#21 Post by Bulkley »

I've used live-CDs for trouble shooting and for occasionally to discover how someone else solved a problem. I also have some specialty tools on live-CD. Clonezilla, Gparted, Kaspersky, SuperGrub and more.

ruffwoof
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Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#22 Post by ruffwoof »

Take a full install, add in live-boot and squashfs-tools, create a /live folder and add a empty filesystem.squashfs (mkdir p;mksquashfs p filesystem.squashfs;rmdir p) to that folder, set the partition label to persistence and add a persitence.conf file to the root directory containing / union (space between, new line after) ... and you can boot that as though a frugal install. The main filesystem is in effect seen as being the 'save' (persistence) holding/space.

Live boot choices include booting persistence persistence-read-only ... which means no changes are stored ... so in effect you're booting your system where it all runs in ram, with any changes being preserved in ram (so runs a lot quicker compared to writing changes to disk) and you can test things out knowing that a reboot has none of the changes being recorded. Great for testing purposes.

I boot mostly that way all the time, but where /home is outside so all changes under that tree are preserved (browser history, user configuration changes ...etc.). Only when updates are apparent do I reboot to full-install type rw mode and apply those changes before rebooting frugally again.

From that setup, its easy to take a snapshot of the full install and have that as the filesystem.squashfs content (cd /live;mksquashfs / filesystem.squashfs -e live) ... which along with initrd and vmlinuz (three files) in effect is a portable live type set (just have to exclude certain files that associate it to a particular device/kit such as /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent* ....etc).

Forward direction there are problems with live-boot as that uses aufs. So in Stretch that has moved away from aufs you'd have to apt-get install aufs-dkms and add a union=aufs kernel boot parameter for booting frugally.

Long backgrounding ... to ask whether if live images were withdrawn, would that also mean live-boot and squashfs-tools (mksquashfs, unsquashfs ...etc). packages being pulled from the main repository? And what about the modified initrd boot file(s) that support live booting? If they were continued to be supported then third party provision of live-cd's would be relatively easy. Whilst support of just that limited set would be much less of a burden for those upon which live was 'dumped'.

milomak
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Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#23 Post by milomak »

btw where can i download these latest live isos?
Desktop: A320M-A PRO MAX, AMD Ryzen 5 3600, GALAX GeForce RTX™ 2060 Super EX (1-Click OC) - Sid, Win10, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Solus
Laptop: hp 250 G8 i3 11th Gen - Sid
Kodi: AMD Athlon 5150 APU w/Radeon HD 8400 - Sid

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Re: Do live Debian images have a future?

#24 Post by Bulkley »

This might be what you want. Live install images

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