The second alpha of Debian Squeeze's Live images is available

Debian Live Squeeze Alpha2
==========================

The Debian Live team is pleased to announce the second alpha of Debian
Squeeze's Live images.

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/squeeze_live_alpha2/


Overview
========

Here's just a quick summary over some of the three most interesting
things, we will do a more extensive announcement for the next release
(supposedly beta1, roughly in sync with d-i beta1):

* live-initramfs, our initramfs-tools hook, was splitted into
live-boot (early userspace) and live-config (late userspace).

the rewrite of the late userspace code brought a dramatic speed
improvement from average 1:30 min boot time to 0:54 for the
gnome-desktop image on a reference system.

the rewrite of the early userspace is work in progress which brings
another huge speed improvement, but this is not sure at this time
if it will make it to squeeze.

* due to space considerations, we most likely will not build
dedicated usb-hdd images anymore in favour of the new iso hybrid
images.

iso hybrid images can both be used as regular iso images to be burn
to an optical media (e.g. dvds), and be dumped to a block device
(e.g. usb sticks).

live-helper, the tool to build the live images, will always support
usb-hdd images, so users requiring dedicated usb-hdd images
can build them very easily themself.

* in addition to amd64 and i386, there are iso images for powerpc
available.


Known issues in this release
============================

* the desktop images are too big to fit on a cdrom, you have to use
dvds. we are currently working out if it's still worth the efforts
to have cdrom sized images in the light of the additional mirror
space it would use.

* live-installer-launcher (that's the icon 'Debian Installer' on
the desktop that allows to start the installation of the live
system with d-i to the harddisk) is still very much work in
progress and could work or not work at all.


For those who care
==================

Debian Live 6.0 alpha2 images were built using the archive state of
squeeze from 2010-07-17, plus the following additional components from sid:

* live-helper 2.0~a19-1
* live-boot 2.0~a15-1
* live-config 2.0~a15-1
* live-installer 20


Thanks
======

Last but not least, our thanks to everyone who has contributed to
debian-live and to everyone who helps make Debian possible.

Regards,
Daniel