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25 February 2011

Debian Live project

The last time I remember talking on this blog about the Debian Live project was when I installed Squeeze on my eeepc 701 4G.

But I'm pretty sure I have made references to the project a thousand times. It's a project I have followed from the very beginning and one which I really love. If I am not mistaken, now I'm just trying to recall from the past, the project was initiated by the live team led by Daniel Baumann after everybody out there was building debian-based live images without any official release available anywhere. Debian live came through to fill that empty space. The project has now produced stable releases out of Lenny and Squeeze. (There were no official releases of Etch) and at the time of writing this they are working on the production of live images of Wheezy. There is a daily, weekly and monthly build on the project website. There you can also find an online cgi builder to tailor the images to your liking.

One important thing to notice is that the project is geared towards helping users to create their own images as the team members focus on developement rather than simply providing pre-built images. Although they produce those images for practical reasons.

On http://live.debian.net/ you can also find links to different sections of development. Among them all I would like to point out the live-manual as I happen to be translating it into Spanish (Together with a partner)

In the manual you'll find everything explained in detail. But here are some of the reasons why I personally love debian live:

- Gives you the tools to build custom images and shows you how to use them.

- It is useful to test hardware. Images can be installed on different media from cds to usb sticks. You can boot them from the media without having to install anything on the hard drive. (You can save changes if you want to, using persistence)

- It is very handy as a rescue tool (That I can assure you)

- You can now use it to install Debian on eeepc's. You will definitely then need to check out the debian-eeepc project led by Ben Armstrong. I'll tell you about it on another occasion. It's gonna be soon.