Skip to main content

Alpha This is a new website theme. Help me improve it and give your feedback (opens in a new tab).

live-wrapper 0.4 released!

Published:

Tags:

Debian Hacking Foss Planet Debian Planet FSFE
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

Last week saw the quiet upload of live-wrapper 0.4 to unstable. I would have blogged at the time, but there is another announcement coming later in this blog post that I wanted to make at the same time.

live-wrapper is a wrapper around vmdebootstrap for producing bootable live images using Debian GNU/Linux. Accompanied by the live-tasks package in Debian, this provides the toolchain and configuration necessary for building live images using Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, MATE and XFCE. There is also work ongoing to add a GNUstep image to this.

Building a live image with live-wrapper is easy:

sudo apt install live-wrapper
sudo lwr

This will build you a file named output.iso in the current directory containing a minimal live-image. You can the test this in QEMU:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G -cdrom live.iso

You can find the latest documentation for live-wrapper here and any feedback you have is appreciated. So far it looks that booting from CD and USB with both ISOLINUX (BIOS) and GRUB (EFI) are all working as expected on real hardware.

The second announcement that I wanted to accompany this announcement is that we will be running a vmdebootstrap sprint where we will be working on live-wrapper at the MiniDebConf in Cambridge. I will be working on installer integration while Ana Custura will be investigating bootloaders and their customisation. I’d like to thank the Debian Project and those who have given donations to it for supporting our travel and accomodation costs for this sprint.

Contact