Window Maker Live Files

  
WHAT IS NEW SINCE THE LAST RELEASE?
  
  The version numbering was modified to reflect the Debian version wmlive is
  ultimately based on.
  
  This release is based on stable Debian/Bookworm release 12.8 and contains
  Linux kernel version 6.11.5 for the amd64 variant provided via Debian's
  backports.
  
  The i386 variant only includes kernel 6.10.11 because the Debian release
  team unfortunately decided to drop i386 kernel packages with the 6.11.*
  series: https://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2024/09/msg00138.html
   
  The amount of included software was augmented by a few programs and tools
  of interest for book digitization and e-book creation. This includes the
  excellent interactive post-processing tool for scanned book pages known as
  scantailor-advanced, the ocrmypdf tool for adding an OCR text layer to PDF
  files using the also included tesseract-ocr, and the latest version of
  Sigil, a versatile editor for the creation of ePub ebooks. 
  
  A selection of TeX Live packages for a decent TeX system, and auxiliary
  tools like AUCTeX for Emacs and the vim-latexsuite were also included.
  
  All of Bookworm's outdated GNUstep packages were replaced with current
  versions recompiled from their still up to date Debian/Trixie sources.
  The included GNUstep programs are more tightly integrated in the desktop.
  
  Only seeing is believing: The GNUstep packages were augmented by a few GUI
  themes demonstrating GNUstep's theming capabilities.
  
  The current Emacs release 29.4 has been added with its GNUstep based GUI.
  This emacs-gnustep variant is provided as a self-contained component and
  does not rely on nor conflict with the official Debian emacs packages.
  
  The bare bones Surf browser has been replaced with otter-browser since
  the former's apparmor based security sandboxing proved too restrictive for
  casual usage.  Also, the GNUstep based netsurf port WebSurf.app was added.
  
  In addition to the ubiquitous qemu-system emulation suite, the dedicated
  NeXT hardware emulator Previous was included. Previous allows running
  legacy m68k based NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP systems. Suitable installation 
  media and premade HDD images can be found on the archive.org website.
  
  For people interested in running vintage operating systems for PC hardware
  the emulator 86Box was also included. It emulates the hardware of computers
  with support for CPU's up to the Pentium II. This emulator excellently 
  manages executing the Intel variants of both NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.
  
  To reduce the time involved with its maintenance, the gtk3-classic
  libraries have been replaced with the standard gtk3 libraries from Debian
  in order to avoid unforeseen incompatibilities.
  
  In order to provide upgrades and bug fixes via the apt package manager,
  wmlive specific components are provided on https://wmlive.rumbero.org/repo
  as standalone packages.  These packages should also be installable on
  standard Debian/Bookworm systems.
  
  The very same sources used to create this ISO image are available after
  installation in /usr/local/src/wmlive-bookworm-12.8.tar.xz on this
  system.  These sources can be used to simply recreate the current ISO
  image, but using the most recent package versions downloaded during the
  process from official Debian mirrors.  Of course, they can be modified to
  produce a tailor made ISO image according to the user's own needs.
  
CREDENTIALS FOR THE LIVE SESSION
  
  The user account for the live session is named 'user' and its password is 'live'. 
  
  When installing the system to disk, this generic user account will disappear and
  be replaced by one of your own definition.
  
SOME WORDS OF CAUTION
  
  Before you start to install wmlive to disk, please be aware of the following
  constraints:
 
  * Both the i386 and the amd64 variants boot and install on UEFI based machines
    and also older BIOS based computers and laptops.
 
  * If using an USB stick instead of a DVD-R for installation, please don't
    even think of using something like 'unetbootin' or 'Universal-USB-Installer' 
    or similar tools to create a bootable USB stick from the wmlive ISO image.
    These tools are designed to unpack and copy the ISO contents to the USB stick 
    and thus actually break the wmlive ISO's functionality.
 
    The wmlive ISO images are isohybrid images containing an embedded partition
    table. To work as intended, they need to be dumped in raw form to a USB stick.
    This is the preferred way of using the provided ISO images.
 
    In Linux you would use one of these commands (the # sign represents the shell
    prompt) to write an ISO to a USB pendrive: 
 
     # dd if=wmlive-bookworm_12.8-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=2048 status=progress
    or
     # cat wmlive-bookworm_12.8-i386.iso > /dev/sdx 
 
    Replace /dev/sdx with the device file name of your actual USB stick.
 
    BE CAREFUL: This process will completely erase it, there is no way back.
    So better be very careful to not overwrite the wrong storage drive! 
 
    If running in Windows, you can use the dd mode of the excellent 'rufus'
    utility which is included on the ISO image in the top level tools folder.
 
CREATING YOUR OWN WMLIVE ISO IMAGE
  
  The wmlive-desktop archive located here contains the exact copy of the
  very build tree which was used to create the ISO image used to install
  the current wmlive system. You will need the already included xz/unxz
  utility to unpack it.
  
  To get started creating your own ISO, you might need to make sure that
  this wmlive build tree is still up to date to properly match the ever
  evolving live-build scripts, unless it stays at the package version
  level already provided with this release.
  
  Some of the Debian binaries used for this version of wmlive and expected
  for the creation of wmlive would normally need first to be compiled from
  the sources provided in the sources folder on the ISO.
  
  To get you started, once the whole build tree has been unpacked into the folder
  /usr/local/src/wmlive/wmlive-desktop, switch into this directory and execute
  the command ./mkwmlive in order to be shown how to go on.  For example
  
      ./mkwmlive amd64 | tee buildlog_$(today)-0.log 2>&1
  
  will run the whole build process until finally an amd64 ISO has been created.
  
  Make sure that the included apt-cacher-ng is properly configured and updated as
  a caching proxy for all the required deb files. Depending on your network
  connection speed, the first time running the build should take quite a while
  for the initial download of approximately 1.5GB for all the required Debian
  packages. As the downloaded package files will be cached for the future, it
  will work much faster for all subsequent runs.
  
  For making actual use of this build tree, you are basically on your own.
  The scripts it contains are currently its own documentation. So if you
  are not able to manage at least some basic shell scripting then there is
  currently no separate documentation to provide an understanding about how
  this all works. Sorry about that, unpaid time is too scarce.
  
  To facilitate understanding how and why the build tree is constructed as
  it is, you definitely might want to refer to the Debian Live manual at
  https://live-team.pages.debian.net/live-manual/ for further reference.
  
  Enjoy!
  
  Paul Seelig <wmlive@users.sf.net>
  http://wmlive.sourceforge.net