DebianDog – A small Debian Live CD | Hacker News Reader

DebianDog – A small Debian Live CD

debiandog.github.io

77 pointsdragonbonheur34 comments

Runs like Puppy (copies image to ram so very fast UI and logs in as root user) which is why I imagine the author is explaining that although it shares the puppy linux approach to things, it uses Debian native package management.

Networking does not appear to use the network manager, wpasupplicant is installed. There is a tray icon for managing network configurations (right-click) but it did nothing at all until I dropped into terminal and ran 'ifconfig wwlan0 up'. Then it attempted to scan for network but found none. Running lsmod suggests that the iwlwifi modules are loaded. I will have to actually read the documentation/google to work out what to do to get wifi working. It might be a firmware thing, so I'll try it on an old Thinkpad that has an atheros wifi card.

Looks nice with good font rendition &c. No office suite at all. I suspect that this is aimed at older desktops for music/browsing &c.

Food for thought: if planning a small live image like this, spend a lot of time and testing making sure that wifi will work in a logical way with graphical UI straight out of the box. Even for broadcom/intel &c adaptors unless no-proprietary-wifi is part of the deal.

Edit: as I thought, wifi works with a wifi adaptor that does not require firmware blob. Posting from within DebianDog butt using elinks because dillo can't cope with hn log-in

I've been looking for super minimal Debian images as docker baselines, perhaps someone could marry the two ideas of quickly testing Linux distros with docker and live distros on CD/USB.

On an unrelated note, the web site is unreadable on my smartphone (androids chrome), and I'm quite fed up with web sites that are either superslow or unreadable on small devices...

If you're looking for a minimal debian image, debootstrap is probably the best way to get one - certainly its result is likely to be more minimal than a live CD.

And if debootstrap is too minimal have a look at the debian 'standard' live iso. This is a headless install that has the package management &c.

I find it useful as a live image and as an installer that allows off-line installation then subsequent connection to the internet to install a customised desktop.

> Downloading DebianDog be ready to learn different package manager and different system setup in Debian manner.

Is this a typo?

Edit: I guess he meant different from Puppy Linux. Confused me since I had no idea what is Puppy Linux

I love how simple and helpful this page is. It tells you what this distro is, describes its default behavior and how to change it (e.g. systemd/sysvinit, single-user/multi-user), gives you the default credentials and links to ISOs describing which you should use ("for older PC") all on one page.

Compare that to ubuntu.com which takes 5 clicks just to get to the download and has none of the above information easily available.

It is refreshingly clear, though for someone not familiar with the ideas of Debian, Linux, Puppy, or bootable Linux CDs, it might be a bit confusing.

Moving this paragraph up the page would help:

DebianDog is a small Debian Live CD shaped to look like Puppy and act like Puppy. Debian structure and Debian behaviour are untouched and Debian documentation is 100% valid for DebianDog. You have access to all Debian repositories using apt-get or synaptic.

If I were rewriting that for a slightly broader audience:

DebianDog is a small bootable Linux OS disk image based on the Debian Live CD shaped to look and act like Puppy Linux.

Debian structure and Debian behaviour are untouched and Debian documentation is 100% valid for DebianDog. You have access to all Debian software repositories using apt-get or synaptic package management tools.

But yes, it's far better than most project/product descriptions I've seen.

Looks awesome. But who really uses a CD for live distros in this day and age? A flash drive would be more apt example. This made me think about how traditionalist large parts of the linux community is. :)

One reason is that it's surprisingly hard to find a cheap flash drives that use hardware enforced read-only access.

Is this desirable? Why would one care if your live CD is able to write to the flash if it were to try?

Yes, it is, if you want to trust that using your bootable media in a hostile system will not infect it with some firmware level nastyness.

Yeah... BIOSes are attack vectors too.

Security reasons. If you boot in a hostile environment you don't have to worry about anything attacking you, hiding in free space, etc.

Of course, this assumes the firmware is secured too; aka Bad USB.

An OS read from a CD player that's read-only won't have this issue; that said, even if the CD is burned and all the free space too, it's likely you could introduce an exploit onto the CD by editing the encoding already on the CD by putting it in a CD player that's able to read & write to it and override the read-only flag on the CD.

In normal Debian fashion, it's a hybrid image that can be dd'ed to either CD or USB.

There are tools like Linux Live USB creator to put ISOs on USB flash drives. http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

I'm a Linux noob, I've played around with some live CDs. The other day I tried to set up a flash drive to work the same way as a live CD. I did get it working eventually, but it was a surprisingly bad experience. Some of the flash drives I created didn't work at all, one of them booted a couple times, then stopped working, the boot process would vary from one boot to the next, etc. In my experience, live CDs "just work" in comparison.

It's really super easy. If you're creating the bootable USB stick on a Windows machine, use RUFUS ( https://rufus.akeo.ie/ ). It's about as straight-forward and noob-friendly as it gets. A single window, options in plain English. If you're creating the bootable USB stick from a Linux machine, use Etcher ( https://www.etcher.io/ ). Also very user friendly and simple. It's even distributed as a downloadable .AppImage file, so it's a double-click install on most distros. On Mac OSX - sorry, no idea, haven't used one since Apple IIe's in middle school, but I'm sure there is something similar out there for OSX (and if nothing else, you could probably get dd working in a terminal if you had to) EDIT: Forgot to mention that RUFUS on Windows will automatically detect which versions of syslinux (the low-level booty-BIOS-y stuff) the .ISO that you select uses, and sets itself up accordingly. It can even use a newer version of syslinux if the one supplied in the .ISO is outdated. Really solid software.

RUFUS is fast but Yumi is best if you want a swiss-army-knife style bootable USB stick with multiple images to choose from, including Windows install DVD images. It also supports setup on an existing USB stick you don't want to completely wipe.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

http://AlternativeTo.net pulled up UNetBootin as a cross-platform alternative.

http://unetbootin.github.io/

UNetBootin seemed to break a lot of images back a few years ago when I used it. Rufus actually scans the image and makes sure it's using the correct bootloader / filesystem type.

On macOS (and Linux etc) you can write images to USB drives using dd, cp, or even cat.

If you prefer a GUI, Etcher is cross-platform.

Thanks for the tip, but Rufus was one of three programs I tried, and it created a couple of duds (and a working stick) for me.

I suspect that the paradigm of bootable flash drives simply leaves more variables uncontrolled than write-once disks do.

my goto method is to use dd to format the USB with an ISO. it is a one step process. do not set 'of' to one of your hard drives.

# if=input_file, of=output_file, bs=block_size

dd bs=4M if=/path/to/fedora.iso of=/dev/sdx status=progress && sync

I've used dd forever, but nowadays these also work equally well (same speed and reliability):

    cp fedora.iso /dev/sdx
    cat fedora.iso > /dev/sdx

I wish I knew what changed. Smarter block sizes? Something about the raw device or ioctl?

They're both faster because they don't read and write block by block. Why people keep recommending dd for stuff like this, I don't have a clue.

Me, every time I do an install. I've got a ton of DVDs left around. I've had USB devices designated as OS install devices, but those always end up repurposed or given away in the months/years between OS installs...but I don't have much other use for the DVDs anymore, so they're always available.

I keep copy of clonezilla on a CD along with my Slackware DVD and an old Ubuntu live DVD. Just in case as emergency tools.

For messing around with random distros I just use a USB stick.

I use DriveDroid (http://softwarebakery.com/projects/drivedroid) on my rooted OnePlus One running CM 13. Very easy and convenient.

Looks decent compared to some of the minimized ram versions I saw a few years ago but I used them to look into really old windows 9* pcs. Worth a test run.

Why so much bloat? ;) Please look at slitaz.org!

DownwardDebianDog?

Author took the time to make the site take the with port width on small devices but hides the content with that ugly sidebar menu... I'm not sure about this. It would make more sense to leave it as it is for mobile.

>[DebianDog] is not Puppy linux and it has nothing to do with Puppy based on Debian.

Even though https://debiandog.github.io/doglinux/ states the same prominently, this should still be emphasized on the linked page.

It's the third paragraph, before the fourth paragraph which compares it to puppy.

That's what I'm quoting. What I am saying is that it should be highlighted on the page for the readers to notice it better. Otherwise they might at a glance mistake this distro for another Puppy Linux spin-off and prematurely close the tab.

Edit: I misunderstood your comment before you added the part after the comma. Looks like what you meant was that the message was prominent enough already. I thought you were suggesting I missed it.

Every paragraph is important for a different reader, you can't emphasize every paragraph.

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