HOME

Bachelorarbeit Projektpraktikum / Practical Bachelor Thesis
„Linux Debian Live Magic” Improvements

The “Debian Live Project” is a tool chain (set of shell scripts) which allows to build Debian Linux images that can be started directly from bootable media, like e.g. CD-ROM, USB disk, etc. instead of having to be installed to disk before.

“Debian Live Magic” is a graphical frontend to the “Debian Live Project”, which allows to create live CDs from within a graphical application.

However “Debian Live Magic” is rather “simple”, as it only allows to create a live image of a particular version of Debian without the possibility to choose specific packages, customize the installation with one’s own scripts or be able to save a configuration of an installation.

The goal of this Bachelor thesis is to improve the “Debian Live Magic” project with at least the following features:

• Selection of individual Debian packages
• Possibility to add one’s own customization (scripts, desktop items, …)
• “Project mechanism”, meaning a possibility to save and restore one’s customized images. This is e.g. needed when one similar live CD is to be used for different occasions, but with slightly modified contents (Think about e.g. a workshop or a repeating lecture)
• Build speed improvements: Building a Debian live CD from scratch takes a lot of time since all the packages (including Kernel and all userland tools) need to be downloaded from the Debian repositories, extracted, installed and packed into an run able image. If only a small thing in a configuration changes the entire CD needs to be re-built. (Which can easily take up to more than 15 minutes, depending on the hardware used for building.)        
  So one major goal of the project should be to include mechanisms to speed up build times of existing projects. Possibilities to speed up the build process include e.g. re-use of the of the chroot (containing all the packages) and/or the use of tmpfs.

As the results of this project could also be interesting for other people, the outcome of this project should be made into a Debian package and contributed back to the community (This means all your code will have to be GPL!)

Requriements: Some basic knowledge in Linux and knowledge of the Debian distribution are probably very helpful for this project. Additionally knowledge of the Python programming language and shell scripting could be of advantage, as these are the implementation languages of “Debian Live Magic” and the “Debian Live Project”. However the project can also serve as a good starting point for people generally interested in Linux and Open Source software development.  

Zurück zur Liste der aktuellen Aushänge