Vertex Linux

A Debian-based Linux distribution built with live-build: latest available GNOME desktop, Flatpak, a themed Fastfetch, and a Calamares installer — with a placeholder purple-triangle brand identity you can swap out for real art whenever it's ready.

What's in here

Path	Purpose
branding/	Drop your full-size PNG logo/wallpapers here and run generate-assets.sh
config/	The live-build project config (package lists, file overlays, hooks)
scripts/build-iso.sh	Builds the installable ISO
scripts/run-vm.sh	Boots the ISO in QEMU
scripts/clean.sh	Wipes live-build's build state
docs/BUILDING.md	Full build/test walkthrough and how each piece fits together

Quick start

Building requires a Debian (or Debian-derived) host — live-build shells out to debootstrap/apt for the target suite, so it can't run on non-Debian systems (this doesn't need to be your daily driver; a throwaway Debian VM or container works fine).

# 1. On a Debian box:
sudo apt install live-build qemu-system-x86 ovmf imagemagick

# 2. Build the ISO (defaults to Debian stable)
sudo ./scripts/build-iso.sh

# 3. Boot it in a VM
./scripts/run-vm.sh

The finished ISO lands in out/vertex-linux-<version>-amd64.iso.

Rebranding

Replace branding/logo.png and/or branding/wallpaper-{1,2,3}.png with your real art (any resolution, PNG), then, from inside branding/:

./generate-assets.sh

This resizes/converts everything into every size and format the OS actually needs (app icons, the Calamares installer branding, the Plymouth boot logo, desktop wallpapers) and writes it straight into config/includes.chroot/. Rebuild the ISO afterwards to pick up the changes. See branding/generate-assets.sh for the exact file naming convention, and drop in wallpaper-4.png, wallpaper-5.png, etc. to add more presets to the GNOME background picker.

Design choices worth knowing about

• Base suite: DEBIAN_SUITE=trixie (stable) by default. testing would track the newest GNOME, but as of GDM 50 that ships a confirmed upstream regression that breaks the login screen entirely — see "Known rough edges" in docs/BUILDING.md. Set DEBIAN_SUITE=testing to go back to bleeding-edge GNOME anyway, or sid for unstable. See scripts/build-iso.sh.
• Installer: Calamares — the de facto standard independent Linux installer today (used by KDE neon, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, and many others); it installs by copying the live squashfs filesystem onto the target disk, then configures the bootloader/users/ locale. Its config lives under config/includes.chroot/etc/calamares/.
• Fastfetch theme: a purple ASCII triangle logo defined in config/includes.chroot/usr/share/vertex/fastfetch-logo.txt, wired up via config/includes.chroot/etc/fastfetch/config.jsonc.
• Kept intentionally minimal — no extra apps beyond GNOME, Flatpak, Fastfetch, and Calamares. Iterate from here.