Requirements ------------ - Linux - live-helper (apt-get install live-helper). - debootstrap (apt-get install debootstrap). - You need to generate a gpg key for signing the repository that get's generated (gpg --gen-key). Building -------- cd debian-live ./build.py Helping ------- The main goal is to remove packages from the final cd image. We want to remove any package we can that isn't required by the pvote application. I've done up an example one where I removed 'libvorbis' and 'libogg'. In the normal Debian distribution, 'libsdl-mixer' requires those and pvote requires 'libsdl-mixer' for audio, but it is using raw wave audio files so it doesn't need OGG. Here's the procedure. 1. Build the CD using the 'Building' procedure above. 2. Decide what package you are going to try and remove. 3. Create an empty file with the same name as the debian source package, but with a '.patch' extension in the 'patches' directory. (e.g. patches/sdl-mixer1.2.patch). 4. Run 'sudo ./build/build-packages.py <package_name>'. That will download the package into the 'build-chroot' chroot directory. That chroot is for patching and building the packages. It will put your package into '/tmp/work/<package_name>', extract it, apply the patch, and then build it. Since at first the patch is blank, you should just get the same patch that the original system used. 5. Now go into that /tmp/work/<package_name> directory and modify the package so that you can remove some dependencies. In the sdl-mixer case, I changed the 'debian/control' file to add the '--disable-music-ogg' line to configure which removes the ogg dependency. 6. Create a patch file and replace the blank patch file you built earlier. Now you have to run 'sudo lh_clean' and then run './build.py' again. I recommend trying out your new CD using a virtual machine to boot the ISO file that is generated (binary.iso). I've been using VirtualBox, but anything that runs Linux should work. If everything worked, it should boot straight into the pvote application. Internals --------- Right now this system is pretty kludgy. It builds the chroot for the live CD once to get the default packages, then it builds the patched packages in another chroot (build-chroot). Then it takes the default packages plus the patched packages and creates its own Debian repository in the 'repro' directory. Then it deletes the 'chroot' directory and starts building the CD again with the 'repro' repository instead of the default Debian one. This complicated process is necessary because the tools that build the CD image use the repository index files to determine the dependencies and the new packages have different dependencies than de default Debian ones.