Revision of How Trisquel is made from Fri, 05/22/2009 - 14:05
The revisions let you track differences between multiple versions of a post.
From the 2.x release onwards, Trisquel is a fully-free Ubuntu-based derivative, so the process for building the distro starts by doing a local mirror of Ubuntu -Hardy for the 2.x branch-, and cleaning it. We update the mirror every night with reprepro and some cron scripts, and then it gets cleaned using a blacklist of non-free packages.
The resultant repo is then used as the real upstream for the development Trisquel mirror, which also includes replacements for some of the removed packages -as the kernel, or pieces that need branding- and a set of packages that tune up the distro, and which incudes artwork, configs, and metapackages.
To update the system, we just need to sync the devel mirror against the freed ubuntu one. Then we check that the changes work by updating our own computers, and then we rsync the devel repo with the official one, at http://archive.trisquel.info
Our packages
We include three groups of packages:- Trisquel metapackages: This set of packages allow you to build several Trisquel systems, including the domestic, educative, professional, and mini editions, along with a basic console environment one.
- Trisquel data packages: they include all the files needed to setup the above environments.
- Extra programs: we include a set of free programs that are not in the Ubuntu repos, as libdvdcss, Jclic, Abanq, etc.
Building up a ISO image
Trisquel is built using debootstrap, it's done by a script that also installs a metapackage and it's dependencies -to build one of the 4 editions of the distro-, compresses it into a squashfs image and builds the iso using isolinux. The script does also apply some changes to the debootstrap directory, to allow it to run in a live environment.The makedistro script also builds a set of source code DVD's.
