Although Debian Live is mostly concerned with avoiding permanent installation, integrating some form of installer to your image is possible. There are number of different "types" of installation, varying in what and how to install the image.
Please note the careful use of capital letters when referring to the "Debian Installer" in this section - when used like this we refer explicitly to the official installer for the Debian system, not anything else. It is often seen abbreviated to "d-i".
The three main types of installer are:
This is a normal Debian Live image with a seperate kernel and initrd which (when selected from the appropriate bootloader) launches into a standard Debian Installer instance, just as if you had downloaded a CD image of Debian and booted it.
This means that Debian is installed by fetching and installing
.deb packages using debootstrap
or
cdebootstrap
, from the local media or some network-base
network, resulting in a standard Debian system being installed to the hard
disk.
This whole process can be preseeded and customised in a number of ways; see
the relevant "DebianInstaller" wiki page and installation guide for
more. This is operational now withing live-helper
.
This is a Debian Live image with a seperate kernel and initrd which (when selected from the appropriate bootloader) launches into an instance of the Debian Installer.
Installation will proceed in an identical fashion to the "Normal"
installation described above, but at the actual package installation stage,
instead of using debootstrap
to fetch and install
packages, the "live" filesystem image is copied to the target. After this
stage, the Debian Installer continues as normal, installing and configuring
items such as bootloaders and local users, etc.
This is working now.
This is where you boot into a graphical Debian Live system and run a wizard-based program which installs and configures the live system, all the time remaining inside the live graphical environment.
This is currently NOT possible with Debian Live.
By default, no installer will be included in the Debian Live image. You can
enable it by using lh_config
:
$ lh_config --help ... [--debian-installer enabled|cdrom|netinst|netboot|businesscard|live|disabled] [--debian-installer-distribution CODENAME|daily] [--debian-installer-preseedfile FILE|URL] ...
The values "Normal", "Live" and "Ubuntu" are not valid values for <term>LH_BINARY_DEBIAN_INSTALLER</term>. Refer to the output of lh_config
cited above to
choose the appropriate values.