Following up on my initial announcement about Debian Libre Live I am happy to report on continued progress and the release of Debian Libre Live version 13.3.0.
Since both this and the previous 13.2.0 release are based on the stable Debian trixie release, there really isn’t a lot of major changes but instead incremental minor progress for the installation process. Repeated installations has a tendency to reveal bugs, and we have resolved the apt sources list confusion for Calamares-based installations and a couple of other nits. This release is more polished and we are not aware of any known remaining issues with them (unlike for earlier versions which were released with known problems), although we conservatively regard the project as still in beta. A Debian Libre Live logo is needed before marking this as stable, any graphically talented takers? (Please base it on the Debian SVG upstream logo image.)
We provide GNOME, KDE, and XFCE desktop images, as well as text-only “standard” image, which match the regular Debian Live images with non-free software on them, but also provide a “slim” variant which is merely 750MB compared to the 1.9GB “standard” image. The slim image can still start a debian installer, and can still boot into a minimal live text-based system.
The GNOME, KDE and XFCE desktop images feature the Calamares installer, and we have performed testing on a variety of machines. The standard and slim images does not have a installer from the running live system, but all images support a boot menu entry to start the installer.
With this release we also extend our arm64 support to two tested platforms. The current list of successfully installed and supported systems now include the following hardware:
- Desktop ADLINK Ampere Altra Developer Platform arm64 Neoverse N1
- Desktop MSI Z790-P WIFI PRO i9-14900K Dasharo
- Laptop Framework 13 AMD AI 9 HX 370
- Laptop Lenovo X201 i7-620M
- Laptop NovaCustom NV56 Intel Ultra 7 155H i915 Dasharo
- Server Dell PowerEdge R630 2xE2680v4
- Server/Router Protectli VP2440
- Server Supermicro MegaDC ARS-110M-NR Ampere Altra Max 128 core 2x25GBe
This is a very limited set of machines, but the diversity in CPUs and architecture should hopefully reflect well on a wide variety of commonly available machines. Several of these machines are crippled (usually GPU or WiFI) without adding non-free software, complain at your hardware vendor and adapt your use-cases and future purchases.
The images are as follows, with SHA256SUM checksums and GnuPG signature on the 13.3.0 release page.
- Amd64 GNOME debian-live-13.3.0-amd64-libre-gnome.iso
- Amd64 KDE debian-live-13.3.0-amd64-libre-kde.iso
- Amd64 XFCE debian-live-13.3.0-amd64-libre-xfce.iso
- Amd64 Standard debian-live-13.3.0-amd64-libre-standard.iso
- Amd64 Slim debian-live-13.3.0-amd64-libre-slim.iso
- Arm64 GNOME debian-live-13.3.0-arm64-libre-gnome.iso
- Arm64 KDE debian-live-13.3.0-arm64-libre-kde.iso
- Arm64 XFCE debian-live-13.3.0-arm64-libre-xfce.iso
- Arm64 Standard debian-live-13.3.0-arm64-libre-standard.iso
- Arm64 Slim debian-live-13.3.0-arm64-libre-slim.iso
Curious how the images were made? Fear not, for the Debian Libre Live project README has documentation, the run.sh script is short and the .gitlab-ci.yml CI/CD Pipeline definition file brief.
Happy Libre OS hacking!

