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Unofficial backport CDs now hosted on cdimage.debian.org

For several years, Kenshi Muto has been doing some awesome work on updated/backported Debian CDs, producing CDs with support for newer hardware and newer features. I've used them myself in the past to help get awkward machines working, and I know they are a great resource for lots of other Debian users.

We've discussed things in the last few weeks, and agreed that it would be useful to host his images on cdimage.debian.org. The best place to look now is http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/backports/. These are unofficial images, so please don't report bugs in the Debian BTS for them.

14:41 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 0 comments

Isohybrid CDs being produced

New feature for Debian CDs

We've had a wishlist bug (#551951) open against debian-cd for some time, asking for the creation of "isohybrid" CD images for i386 and amd64. These are special in that as well as the normal CD-based ISO9660 filesystem they also contain a valid-looking DOS-style partition table. Thus, if you simply copy one of these images raw to a USB stick a normal PC BIOS will boot the image directly. This would be a neat feature, making it much easier for people to use standard Debian installer images on their USB sticks without having to follow a lot more instructions.

Support for this feature was added in syslinux/isolinux quite a while back (thanks to H Peter Anvin and the other syslinux contributors), but this depended on post-processing images with the isohybrid program. Due to the special way that we make our CD and DVD images to produce jigdo images as well, that wouldn't work for us: the jigdo files would no longer match the ISO files. Bugger...! Recently, along came more help in the form of Thomas Schmitt (author of xorriso) and George Danchev, its Debian maintainer. Recent versions of xorriso support creating isohybrid images directly, which is very handy. We've worked together in the last few months on porting my old JTE code (which creates our jigdo images) from cdrkit to xorriso, and after a lot of testing and debugging we now have things working fully. I've added a small amount of code in debian-cd to use the new xorriso features, and for the last couple of weeks all of the i386, amd64 and i386-amd64 multi-arch CDs and DVDs have been built as hybrids.

It's been a delight working with Thomas and George - they're enthusiastic, helpful and friendly. Thanks, guys!

What does this mean for end users?

Instead of having to specially prepare USB sticks for the installer, you can now simply use dd to write the image straight to the raw stick, e.g.:

# dd if=debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdX

I'm expecting to be using this code from now on for new releases, i.e. d-i beta and RC releases and for Squeeze itself when we get there. I'm not planning on backporting this code into the Lenny branch of debian-cd as it's a lot of work and I don't want to destabilise things there.

What's next?

We need to clear up some of the maintenance around the code as it stands; I'm planning on moving libjte inside my existing jigit package, as that's a sensible place to put it. That will come after the Squeeze release, though.

We need to finalise boot support for other architectures in xorriso; I added support for them into mkisofs/genisoimage a long time ago and we've already moved some of that into xorriso.

Thomas and George have also been working hard to give me faster/better size estimation code, useful for making debian-cd run faster.

Finally: I'd like to add support into xorriso for creating the nasty HFS hybrid images that are needed for booting Macs. The code that does this in cdrkit is probably some of the worst that I've ever worked with, and I'd like to get away from it. If only Apple hadn't stupidly built their proprietary platform around this shit and had used open standards instead. :-(

Once we have these bits in xorriso, I'll be able to move production of all of the CDs across from genisoimage to xorriso. Very nearly there for being able to drop the last remnants of Schily-ware from the Debian archive...

18:36 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 8 comments

Debian CDs with firmware included

We've just posted a news item about the removal of non-free firmware from Debian's Linux kernel packages. Kudos to the kernel team and others for the work involved to make this happen!

While we would be much happier if these binary blobs were not necessary at all, it's clear that some of our users may depend on them to support the hardware they are using. So, as mentioned in that news item, we've started making some unofficial CD images available that include the non-free firmware packages that we can redistribute. If you need one of these CDs, daily builds are to be found at http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ . Starting with the next debian-installer release (hopefully RC1, coming soon!), we'll be generating fixed versions of these images to match each release too.

Be aware that these are only netinstall images, equivalent to the normal free netinst images that we normally produce but with the firmware files added. If you want to do an installation entirely from a set of CDs/DVDs/BDs then you will need to burn one of these in addition to that set, then feed the rest of the set when prompted to by the installer.

13:46 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 4 comments

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD CDs now happening

Thanks to the sterling work of aurel32, debian-cd now supports creating CDs for the kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386 ports. For now, only the daily "sid" builds will be available - see http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/sid_d-i/arch-latest/. Once there's been another alpha/beta release of d-i then we'll get squeeze daily builds and weekly builds too.

21:55 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 0 comments

Final Sarge CDs done and released

Forgot to mention, but some people seem to have spotted anyway. The last (ever!) official set of Sarge CDs and DVDs is available. I'd strongly advise against most people using them, as Etch is a much better bet and Lenny isn't too far away. But for those people that might want them, you can find them in the "archive" area: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/3.1_r8/

19:48 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 0 comments

Sarge r2 CDs and DVDs done

In the expected place shortly.

00:40 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 2 comments