This manual serves as a single access point to all documentation related to the Debian Live project and in particular applies to the software produced by the project for the Debian 7.0 "wheezy" release. An up-to-date version can always be found at ‹http://live.debian.net/›
While live-manual is primarily focused on helping you build a live system and not on end-user topics, an end-user may find some useful information in these sections: The Basics covers preparing images to be booted from media or the network, and Customizing run time behaviours describes some options that may be specified at the boot prompt, such as selecting a keyboard layout and locale, and using persistence.
Some of the commands mentioned in the text must be executed with superuser privileges which can be obtained by becoming the root user via su or by using sudo. To distinguish between commands which may be executed by an unprivileged user and those requiring superuser privileges, commands are prepended by $ or # respectively. This symbol is not a part of the command.
While we believe that everything in this manual is important to at least some of our users, we realize it is a lot of material to cover and that you may wish to experience early success using the software before delving into the details. Therefore, we suggest reading in the following order.
First, read this chapter, About this manual, from the beginning and ending with the Terms section. Next, skip to the three tutorials at the front of the Examples section designed to teach you image building and customization basics. Read Using the examples first, followed by Tutorial 1: A standard image, Tutorial 2: A web browser utility and finally Tutorial 3: A personalized image. By the end of these tutorials, you will have a taste of what can be done with Debian Live.
We encourage you to return to more in-depth study of the manual, perhaps next reading The basics, skimming or skipping Building a netboot image, and finishing by reading the Customization overview and the chapters that follow it. By this point, we hope you are thoroughly excited by what can be done with Debian Live and motivated to read the rest of the manual, cover-to-cover.
A list of authors (in alphabetical order):
This manual is intended as a community project and all proposals for improvements and contributions are extremely welcome. The preferred way to submit a contribution is to send it to the mailing list. Please see the section Contact for more information.
When submitting a contribution, please clearly identify its copyright holder and include the licensing statement. Note that to be accepted, the contribution must be licensed under the same license as the rest of the document, namely, GPL version 3 or later.
The sources for this manual are maintained using the Git version control system. You can check out the latest copy by executing:
$ git clone git://live.debian.net/git/live-manual.git
Prior to submission of your contribution, please preview your work. To preview the live-manual, ensure the packages needed for building are installed by executing:
# apt-get install make po4a sisu-complete libnokogiri-ruby
You may build the live-manual from the top level directory of your Git checkout by executing:
$ make build
Since it takes a while to build the manual in all supported languages, you may find it convenient when proofing to build for only one language, e.g. by executing:
$ make build LANGUAGES=en
It is also possible to build by document type, e.g:
$ make build FORMATS=pdf
Or combine both, e.g:
$ make build LANGUAGES=it FORMATS=html
Anyone can directly commit to the repository. However, we ask you to send bigger changes to the mailing list to discuss them first. To push to the repository, you must follow this procedure:
$ mkdir -p ~/.ssh/identity.d
$ wget http://live.debian.net/other/keys/git@live.debian.net \
-O ~/.ssh/identity.d/git@live.debian.net
$ wget http://live.debian.net/other/keys/git@live.debian.net.pub \
-O ~/.ssh/identity.d/git@live.debian.net.pub
$ chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/identity.d/git@live.debian.net*
$ cat >> ~/.ssh/config << EOF
Host live.debian.net
Hostname live.debian.net
User git
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/identity.d/git@live.debian.net
EOF
$ git clone git@live.debian.net:/live-manual.git
$ cd live-manual && git checkout debian-next
$ git commit -a -m "Adding a section on applying patches."
$ git push
To start a translation for a new language, follow these steps:
Note: You can use make clean to clean your git tree before pushing. This step is not compulsory thanks to the .gitignore file but it is a good practice to avoid committing files involuntarily.