Debian Image Generation for SBCs using DEBOS: Controlling Packages and Files (FOSForums 2023)

On the last weekend August 26th and 27th occur the FOS Forums first edition, a conference focused on share knowledge and promote discussions with people involved on Open Source world. The talks approached several areas, but in all of then the focus was to spoke about open source software and about what each community is working on (features, bugs, debugs and others). Not only as a listener, I also participate as a speaker with my friend Pablo Lucas, on a briefly talk about debos project. You can check more below.

First of all: what is debos?

Debos is a Debian OS Image Builder (https://github.com/go-debos/debos), so as this definition says, debos is a tool to builds the image based on Debian OS. This tool was written on Go language and uses a yaml file as a recipe, to read and to execute its actions.

Why to use debos?

The idea of debos is that you can define what will be installed in your image creating a ready-to-use image, saving memory from resources that will not be used and simplifying the image, not using an interface, for example. 

Besides that, when we talk about to build an image we can mention other projects like Yocto Project, that can support others OS and enables a deeper level of configuration, working with layers. Sometimes that level of changes is not required. With debos it's possible to customize the image in a way that you can easily see, read and understand what is happening, that's because everything is written on a yaml file, that is a very readable file.

FOS Forums presentation

You can find the presentation below. The idea was to present the tool and speak about the applications in our project. I leave here my thanks to all organization for the great event! Check more about FOS Forums: https://www.fosforums.org/