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.