Live manual Debian Live

# Debian Live Manual

# Installation

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# 3. Installation

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3.1 Requirements

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Building live system images has very few system requirements:

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- Superuser (root) access

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- An up-to-date version of live-build

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- A POSIX-compliant shell, such as bash or dash

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- debootstrap

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- Linux 2.6 or newer.

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Note that using Debian or a Debian-derived distribution is not required - live-build will run on almost any distribution with the above requirements.

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3.2 Installing live-build

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You can install live-build in a number of different ways:

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- From the Debian repository

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- From source

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- From snapshots

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If you are using Debian, the recommended way is to install live-build via the Debian repository.

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3.2.1 From the Debian repository

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Simply install live-build like any other package:

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# apt-get install live-build

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3.2.2 From source

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live-build is developed using the Git version control system. On Debian based systems, this is provided by the git package. To check out the latest code, execute:

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$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-build.git

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You can build and install your own Debian package by executing:

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$ cd live-build
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us
$ cd ..

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Now install whichever of the freshly built `.deb` files you were interested in, e.g.

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# dpkg -i live-build_4.0-1_all.deb

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You can also install live-build directly to your system by executing:

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# make install

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and uninstall it with:

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# make uninstall

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3.3 Installing live-boot and live-config

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Note: You do not need to install live-boot or live-config on your system to create customized live systems. However, doing so will do no harm and is useful for reference purposes. If you only want the documentation, you may now install the live-boot-doc and live-config-doc packages separately.

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3.3.1 From the Debian repository

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Both live-boot and live-config are available from the Debian repository as per Installing live-build.

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3.3.2 From source

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To use the latest source from git, you can follow the process below. Please ensure you are familiar with the terms mentioned in Terms.

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- Checkout the live-boot and live-config sources

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$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-boot.git
$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-config.git

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Consult the live-boot and live-config man pages for details on customizing if that is your reason for building these packages from source.

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- Build live-boot and live-config .deb files

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You must build either on your target distribution or in a chroot containing your target platform: this means if your target is buster then you should build against buster.

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Use a personal builder such as pbuilder or sbuild if you need to build live-boot for a target distribution that differs from your build system. For example, for buster live images, build live-boot in a buster chroot. If your target distribution happens to match your build system distribution, you may build directly on the build system using `dpkg-buildpackage` (provided by the dpkg-dev package):

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$ cd live-boot
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us
$ cd ../live-config
$ dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us

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- Use applicable generated .deb files

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As live-boot and live-config are installed by live-build system, installing the packages in the host system is not sufficient: you should treat the generated .deb files like any other custom packages. Since your purpose for building from source is likely to test new things over the short term before the official release, follow Installing modified or third-party packages to temporarily include the relevant files in your configuration. In particular, notice that both packages are divided into a generic part, a documentation part and one or more back-ends. Include the generic part, only one back-end matching your configuration, and optionally the documentation. Assuming you are building a live image in the current directory and have generated all .deb files for a single version of both packages in the directory above, these bash commands would copy all of the relevant packages including default back-ends:

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$ cp ../live-boot{_,-initramfs-tools,-doc}*.deb config/packages.chroot/
$ cp ../live-config{_,-sysvinit,-doc}*.deb config/packages.chroot/