debian-live
Configuration for a Debian live system. With this configuration it should be possible to create a Debian live ISO-image on a Debian 8 (Jessie) system.
Building a CD
You need the live-build tools. You can install them by this command:
$ aptitude install live-build
In the directory where you have this configuration, you can build the image by this commands:
$ lb config
$ sudo lb build
Or simply by calling make.
The resulting ISO can be dumped on a USB thumb drive. Be careful when doing this,
if you give to of= the wrong device you may destroy data.
$ sudo dd bs=4096 if=live-image*.hybrid.iso of=/dev/sdX
Persistence
Persistence is enabled by default. Whenever you want to boot with persistence
disabled, you have to remove persistence of the commandline in the boot
menu.
For persistence to work you need an persistence partition with an
persistence.conf file. For example, if you want a persistent /home folder you
can create in the remaining space of the USB thumb drive an extra partition
with the label persistence. Add to this partition a file persistence.conf
with the following content.
/home union
There is also a small script that will create a persistence partition for you. In addition it will create one data partition that is also accessible by Windows PCs. You can use the script like this:
runhaskell CopyToUsbDrive.hs live-image.iso /dev/sdX
User and password
Name: user
Password: live
Speeding up successive builds
If you want/need to build the image more than once, you can speed things up by installing approx. Here is what my /etc/approx/approx.conf looks like:
debian http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian
And in /etc/live/build.conf I have added this line:
LB_MIRROR_BOOTSTRAP="http://localhost:9999/debian"
Other resources
More and much better configurations can be found at the git repository of the live-build project itself.
Ready-made images are also available at live-system.org. Sadly there are not always images available of the sid/testing distribution.