I am developing a Debian GNU/Linux-based operating system/distribution. It's for visually impaired people. I took the "standard" Debian Live CD and built my distribution from a bare metal command line. Here are some features:
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Xfce desktop, heavily modified for the visually impaired;
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High contrast themes, icons and color schemes;
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Pre-configured Orca screen reader;
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An intuitive and simple screen magnifier;
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Virtual keyboard;
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Basic set of desktop applications, logos, wallpapers and bash scripts made by me.
The system is pretty much ready and installable, in some kind of "alpha" state. I don't have a name for it yet, so I call it "Redebian" and use this name in my scripts. I will present it in a science and technology fair in my school in August (I'm currently in High School), so the project is very important for me.
But one thing is bothering me: I don't know how to properly change my OS name from Debian to whatever its name will be. I googled for several days and got suggestions to edit /etc/os-release
, /etc/issue
and a few more files, but I am afraid to break the system. I'm using the official Debian repositories, so the release name is a very fragile factor.
What should I do to safely and properly change the name of my Debian-based operating system? For example, I want it to show "Welcome to Redebian" when the system is booting instead of "Welcome to Debian". And I want the update-grub
script to recognize the system as "Redebian".
Best Answer
Taking the source from @Jeff Schaller, you will have to edit the following:
For every other software that your operating system may need, you will at a very minimum have to download the DEB sources, run a
find . -exec sed -i /debian/redebian/g {} \;
for all the files, and then recompile each of the DEB packages. This is a hacky approach, but you will get the desired result for most packages. Basically, we are taking every instance of debian and replacing it with redebian for every software.