News :: Debian Live Initiative



I was sarcastic when I said the Debian guys finally realised the need for a Debian live cd.
However the fact is that many take a lot from Debian without giving much back. I know it is not easy to give back to Debian, given the monolith it is, but at least it is the most democratic software project there is.
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Debian is as much a philosophical and academic exercise as it is an OS

Quite right, their focus is quite different and much more fundamental (and seminal) than that of an ubuntu or knoppix, and that's great.

Nonetheless they complain (not without justification) when Ubuntu sets up its own "deb" repos (not always compatible with Debian official repos) because they are creating the same issues that now exist with rpms - Suse rpms are not necessarily compatible with Fedora etc, so an rpm is no longer an rpm.  The same forking thing (no pun intended) is now happening with deb packages.

But Ubuntu, Knoppix and things like GenieOS (which is just an unofficial 1-cd debian installer) are all responses to *what people want*.

By all means, debian ought to keep its ideological purity - it's necessary.  And to their credit, there were informal suggestions made on a mail list to the GenieOS developer that he join the Debian installer team.  But by that time, he'd already established GenieOS on his own.  And  Ubuntu (like it or not) is unstoppable at the moment.  Perhaps it just takes people outside of the Debian mindset to see how it ought to best be applied on the desktop; perhaps all this distro forking is just inevitable as the linux way of doing things?
I'd not call thousand of developers' work a philosophical exercise. We are talking of hundreds of thousand of lines of code scrutinized on a daily basis.

The 'what people want' attitude is the one that justifies poor software and bad customer service and, in politics, usually goes along with 'what God wants' and leads to suspension of human rights and beheading of infidels.

I personally don't like Ubuntu, actually I think it's crap, but they have all the right to fork from Debian, because the liberal license allows them to.

About Ubuntu's unstoppability, if Debian decided to prevent the guys in the Channel Islands to rsync with their mirrors for just 24 hours, who knows how much it will cost...
I don't get it, why does any 'live' cd have to be 'official' ?,
to prove that it's 'gnu' ? If it's free, then just say it's free
or whatever. I like and respect lot about Debian but I don't want to have to worship it. I mean what's next? Debian mp3 players ?
:laugh:
Quote (humpty @ Mar. 11 2006,17:10)
I don't get it, why does any 'live' cd have to be 'official' ?


Quote (daniel baumann http://blog.daniel-baumann.ch/2006....iative, )

Why create our own live system?

Debian is the Universal Operating System: IMHO we should have an official live system for showing arround and to officially represent the true, one and only Debian system with the following main advantages:

It's an official Debian subproject.
It reflects the (current) state of one distribution.
It runs on as much architectures as possible.
It consists of unchanged Debian packages only.
It does not contain any unofficial package.
It uses an unaltered Debian kernel-image with no additional patches (except from live system specific ones which maybe required).


I add my two cents: to prevent and reduce fragmentation, to have one, solid cvs tree, because 1000's of good developers can do better than a dozen skilled programmers.

However, my original question was; will DSL play a role?
For the lack of answers from the core developers and the recent mood on this forum, my impression is that the aswer is negative.

If there was an official Debian livecd, I'd probably invest my time in it, rather than a derivative.
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