FAI.Me. Build Your Own Debian Live Image (Via Web)
An Anonymous Coward writes:
(FAI - Fully Automatic Installation)
https://fai-project.org/FAIme/live/
-= Custom Live Media, also for Newer Hardware
-= A web service for building your own customized Debian live image"At this years Debian conference in South Korea I've presented[1] the new feature of the FAIme web service. You can now build your own Debian live media/ISO.
The web interface provides various settings, for e.g. adding a user name and its password, selecting the Debian release (stable or testing), the desktop environment and the language. Additionally you can add your own list of packages, that will be installed into the live environment. It's possible to define a custom script that gets executed during the boot process. For remote access to the live system, you can easily sepcify a github, gitlab or salsa account, whose public ssh key will be used for passwordless root access. If your hardware needs special grub settings, you may also add those. I'm thinking about adding an autologin checkbox, so the live media could be used for a kiosk system.
And finally newer hardware is supported with the help of the backports kernel for the Debian stable release (aka bookworm). This combination is not available from the official Debian live images or the netinst media because the later has some complicated dependencies which are not that easy to resolve2[2]. At DebConf24 I've talked to Alper who has some ideas[3] how to improve the Debian installer environment which then may support a backports kernel."
- Thomas Lange,
- https://blog.fai-project.org/
- https://blog.fai-project.org/posts/faime-live/
[Editor's Comment: OK, I've downloaded a Debian build featuring software that I have chosen. It boots OK and looks fine. Do I trust it? No, not yet. I have no idea who FAI are although I can see who they claim to be. Nor do I know if they are using the correct packages. But I will run it on a spare machine and wireshark it to death when I have some spare time. If any of you know Thomas Lange (Thomas Lange is the main author of FAI. He's a Debian Developer since 2000 and a sysadmin since 1992. He started the FAI project in 1999.) or know more about the project then please leave a comment.]
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