Debian Live
 

Great new version of a favourite distro.

Downloaded & dd'ed to a pendrive. Booted up to my usual desktop, but now,on any computer.

Also, installing from pendrive very fast compared to using dvd's.

I think this is the version for me!

There are many of us using DebianLive now on our installation media, another great things about DebianLive is you can, and may distros already do LinuxMint being just one, make your own version with the Debian LiveBuild scripts. If you are feeling adventurous I highly recommend looking into this brilliant piece of Debian and learning how DebianLive is actually made.

Yes indeed.

I am still trying to work through all the tutorial examples. Seems to work real well. Another couple months and I will have time to actually try it out.

Cynix is coming.

Lol, Cynix is here among us already, you just have to put yourself on a bootable DVD :p

Good grief....behind the times already!!!

I fully intend having a go at my own version,
have downloaded the info, need to read it.

Just be very aware that LiveBuild is a work on progress and can change suddenly from one version to another. I think, I may be wrong though, there can be up to 3 different versions at a time with squeeze,wheezy, and sid each having a different version. I'm currently using the sid version and things I used to do in the squeeze version will not work in the sid version. Don't let this put you off though because LiveBuild is getting better and better all the time.

I have learned to use the auto scripts and would highly recommend learning this soon after you understand and can cope with the basics.

Have now read most of the docs; will install live-build on another machine & give it a go.

I think I'll try creating a repository on it to use with live-build. Need to find/remember
where I saw the docs for that is.

In for a penny, in for a pound......

no sound
 

Put aside my attempt to create a mirror from dvd's for the moment, & had a couple of tries at creating live usb-hdd images.

1st attempt:- forgot sound/no mixer (added mc sc herrie to a base install).
2nd attempt:- added mc sc herrie rexima => no sound & a 'us' keyboard!
3rd attempt:- added mc sc herrie alsa & attempted to get a 'uk' keyboard => no sound, no 'uk' keyboard.

Tried modprobe snd-hda, still no sound. Did loadkeys uk, got my keyboard layout.

Linux-sound-base/alsa-base are in the image; can't think what to try next, so have stopped for now.

Any thoughts as to why I'm lacking sound?

When you say base install what do you mean? Live has standard, gnome, kde, xfce, lxde, rescue and the four desktop environments should all have sound in them and also give you multiple keyboards to choose from during installation (installation reverts to the Debian Installer Text Install)

invocation
 

Base install => standard

lb config -b usb-hdd --packages "mc sc herrie alsa" --language uk

lb build 2>&1 | tee thirdbuild.log

thirdbuild.log is attached (hopefully..)

The log file isn't complete, there is nothing in it that I can see (at 4am ;) ) that show you downloaded the packages you asked it to.
From my understanding "Standard" doesn't have a desktop environment, this is why I select standard an then give a list
like this;
alsa-base
alsa-utils
banshee
empathy
evince
firmware-linux
firmware-linux-free
gdm3
gedit
gnome-panel
iceweasel
keyboard-configuration
laptop-detect
libreoffice
nautilus
network-manager-gnome
synaptic
vlc

#if ARCHITECTURE amd64
ia32-libs
ia32-libs-gtk
#endif


with my firmware, apart from the two listed above, in another file.

Have you worked through the tutorials listed in the Live Build guide you downloaded? My suggestion is to work through them first so you can see Live Build in action then develop your own package lists and experiment.

Looking at your list:-

I had alsa but not laptop-detect.

I'll add that into the mix tomorrow, & see if that sorts it.

Thanks for your reply.

laptop detect wont help this issue, it is primarily for installing appropriate packages to help with using laptop batteries with power saving power schemes.

Tried again, but this time when I went to use the pendrive, it threw up "No config file found".

I was given a prompt:- boot:

I assume this to have been Grub2.

Not to worry; I'm looking into how the scripts actually work now, so may be able to save bandwith, which I am running/have run out of for this month.

Thanks for trying to help, appreciated.

I don't think it was Grub 2. Grub 2 lists the available OSs and/or kernels. If it justs gives you a prompt - boot: it is probably asking you to tell it where initrd and vmlinuz are. I think it is probably syslinux which is another bootloader used in Linux CD/DVDs, and is what you will see initially when booting a Debian CD/DVD. The fact it is going - boot: says to me something went wrong loading syslinux in the Live Build.