[Discuss] Debian based live CD (NOT DVD)?

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2014-01-30 10:45-0800 Murray Strome wrote:

> I have been doing a bit of searching for a Live CD based upon Debian. I have 
> an old PC I want to do a few things with, but it won't boot from DVD's and 
> all the distro's I have been able to find this morning are too large for a 
> CD.  I did download a Fedora based Live CD which boots, but I have been 
> unable to do some things I would like, and the Yum Expander doesn't seem to 
> work very well.
>
> I tried LUbuntu (which fits on a CD) but it does not recognize the keyboard 
> so I cannot do anything with it.
>
> Any suggestions?

Hi Murray:

Have you checked whether that old computer can boot from USB? If so,
you should be able to use a pre-made live USB distro (or make one
yourself with Live Systems, see below). There are essentially no size
limitations for such Live distros since inexpensive USB sticks can be
bought that are much larger than DVD's.

Another possibility is to build your own Debian live iso with the Live
Systems project.  Apparently you don't need your own Debian distro to
do that. See the "Installation" chapter in
http://live.debian.net/manual/current/html/live-manual.en.html where
it is stated:
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3.1 Requirements
Building live system images has very few system requirements:

* Superuser (root) access

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

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

* debootstrap or cdebootstrap

* Linux 2.6 or newer.

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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I used an immature version of this "Live Systems" project 3 years ago
when it was called live-helper and had essentially only one developer
(Daniel Baumann).  There were some issues I had to work around, but
with help from Daniel, I finally got it to work.  Fast forward 3
years, and it looks (from skimming through the above manual) that this
project has matured and could (with careful selection of software
packages) create a Debian Live iso that would fit on a CD. You could
apparently also use Live Systems to create a Live USB stick distro as
well with much less careful package selection required.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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