Welcome to live-wrapper’s documentation!¶
Contents:
Introduction¶
live-wrapper is a tool produced by the Debian Live Team that can be used to create Debian-based live images for use with CDs, DVDs or USB sticks.
live-wrapper is designed to, as far as is possible, exist only as glue between existing tools. The root filesystem is built using vmdebootstrap and isohybrid image creation is provided by xorriso.
Quickstart¶
Super Fast Quickstart¶
Building images with live-wrapper is quite simple. For the impatient:
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.
Warning
Currently live-wrapper will create a lot of files and directories in the
current working directory. There is a TODO item to move these to a temporary
location and clean up afterwards, though this has not yet been fully
implemented. You may want to use an empty directory to run lwr in.
Customising the Image¶
There are a number of supported command-line arguments that can be passed to live-wrapper. These change the behaviour to create a customised image.
Changing the Distribution¶
By default, the ISO image will be built using the stable distribution. If
you’d like to build using testing or unstable you can pass the -d
parameter to live-wrapper like so:
sudo lwr -d testing
Using an Alternative Mirror¶
By default, vmdebootstrap will use the mirror configured in your
/etc/apt/sources.list. If you have a faster mirror available, you may want
to change the mirror you’re using to create the image. You can do this with the
-m parameter:
sudo lwr -m http://localhost/debian/
Customising Packages¶
There are two methods of specifying extra packages to be installed into the
live image: the -t and the -e paramaters. The difference between these
two parameters is that the list of tasks given to -e is passed to
debootstrap for installation as part of the initial root filesystem
creation, whereas the packages passed to -t are installed as part of the
vmdebootstrap hook.
This essentially means that any packages installed using -e will not have
their “Recommends” installed, but will have their “Depends” installed while
packages installed using -t will have both installed making -t the
suitable place for the installation of task packages.
There is no reason you cannot pass your entire package list to -t, these
are seperated mainly to help with the readability of parameters passed to
live-wrapper.
For example:
sudo lwr -e vim -t science-typesetting
Testing the Image with QEMU¶
You can easily test your created live images with QEMU.
Warning
You will need to increase the amount of memory available to QEMU when running the live image. The image will crash if run with the default memory limit.
To test the image using BIOS boot:
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G -cdrom live.iso
For EFI boot you will need to install the ovmf package and then run:
qemu-system-x86_64 -bios /usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd -m 2G -cdrom live.iso
Next Steps¶
To learn more about using live-wrapper, you can read the man page or check out the Advanced Topics section of this documentation.
Advanced Topics¶
Bootloader Customisation¶
By default, both ISOLINUX (for BIOS boot) and GRUB 2 (for EFI boot) are
installed into the images. A loopback.cfg file is also installed to allow
for the image to be booted while still an ISO image in a filesystem.
You can pass --no-isolinux to prevent the installation of ISOLINUX to the
image if you do not want ISOLINUX.
You can pass --no-grub to prevent the installation of GRUB to the image.
If you do not want GRUB installed but you would still like the loopback.cfg
file to be installed, you can pass --grub-loopback-only.
Developer Documentation¶
Helper Documentation¶
Root Filesystem Helpers¶
Bootloader Helpers¶
CD Filesystem Helpers¶
This module provides helpers for generating the metadata stored in .disk/ on the cdroot. Directory listing of /.disk/ -r–r–r– 1 0 0 29 Sep 8 2015 [ 194732 00] archive_trace -r–r–r– 1 0 0 5 Sep 8 2015 [ 194733 00] base_components -r–r–r– 1 0 0 0 Sep 8 2015 [ 907 00] base_installable -r–r–r– 1 0 0 5 Sep 8 2015 [ 194734 00] cd_type -r–r–r– 1 0 0 89 Sep 8 2015 [ 194735 00] info -r–r–r– 1 0 0 49 Sep 8 2015 [ 194736 00] udeb_include