Window Maker Live Files

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

The i386 variant is freely available and ready for use now. To unpack the two 7z archives of the amd64 and arm64 variant, repectively, a password is required. This password will become freely available on this very page at the end of this year. But until then, only downloaders who supported our work on wmlive with any donation amount will be provided with the required password.

Please refer to https://wmlive.sourceforge.net/downloads.html for further information.

People preferring to not donate, for whatever reason, always have the possibility to build the desired wmlive ISO variant on their own using the provided source code. Or simply wait until the end of the year, when the password will be publicly disclosed.

Fellow open source developers with a proven body of source contributions are eligible to receive a free password upon explicit request via electronic mail. If any of your open source work is even contained in wmlive, we'd be honored to provide you the needed password.

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.

WHAT IS NEW IN RELEASE 13.2?

This release is based on stable Debian/Trixie release 13.2 and uses the Linux
kernel version 6.12.57 for both the amd64/x86_64 and the arm64/aarch64 variant.

Despite the deprecation of the i386 architecture on behalf of the Debian
project, the 32-bit variant of wmlive for i686 class CPU's is provided as an
experimental hybrid of the older bookworm installer and backported 6.10.11
kernel, combined with the current trixie/i386 package pool.  It is exclusively
aimed at users preferring to continue operating still perfectly working
old/retro hardware at the expense of any support guarantees.

In addition to the overall Debian/Trixie package updates, newer packages
include palemoon-33.9.1, 86box-5.1, and previous-3.9.  The transmission
bittorrent client was replaced by qbittorrent.  New components include the VPN
client riseup-vpn, the interactive firewall application OpenSnitch, and the
QDiskInfo SMART tool.

The firefox-esr web browser was added in order to better confront the
contemporary enshittification of the modern web. Nonetheless, its undesirable
AI and telemetry "features" have been turned off by default using a custom
user.js file.

The GNUstep based Emacs.app and PikoPixel.app have been dropped.  The amount of
included dockapps was reduced due to practicability considerations.  The
GNUstep based WebSurf.app was replaced by NetSurf.app.  The vlc video player
was dropped in favour of smplayer with mpv.

Since the majority of XFCE components are already included, the xfce4-desktop
has been added as a second desktop session option.

A simple graphical frontend for the useradd and deluser command based on yad is
provided for basic user management.

This release offers for the first time basic CJK Asian language support for
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.  Since localizations are not yet complete, Asian
users will most certainly still need to know sufficient English to find their
way around the system.

Due to a combination of more firmware package inclusions and the complex nature
of Asian fonts, there is a notable increase of storage size requirements for
all wmlive ISO images.

Installed systems with space constraints can easily be trimmed from big
unnecessary packages using the graphical dpigs command frontend wmlive-diskhogs
to remove large disk space consumers.

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 pen drive: 

     # dd if=wmlive-trixie_13.2_amd64.iso of=/dev/sdx bs=2048 status=progress
    or simply
     # cat wmlive-trixie_13.2_arm64.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.

  * The standard installation procedure is designed for offline installation,
    so no network configuration needs to exist during the installation stage.
    Network configuration can later be managed exclusively by NetworkManager
    on the running system after successful installation to disk.

    Alternatively, if you choose the expert mode installation menu entry, all
    possible installation options will become available.

If you find any issue, fault, or simply have any idea for improvement, please 
don't hesitate to send a mail to 'wmlive@rumbero.org' to share your thoughts. 

CREATING YOUR OWN WMLIVE ISO IMAGE

The wmlive-trixie_13.2-src 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. 

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-trixie_13.2, 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 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