+.TH CASPER 7 "Thu, 28 Sep 2006" "1.69" "Initramfs-tools hook"
+
+.SH NAME
+casper \- a hook for initramfs-tools to boot live systems.
+
+.SH SYNOPSIS
+.B BOOT=casper
+As kernel parameter boot prompt.
+
+.SH DESCRIPTION
+Casper is a hook for initramfs-tools used to generate an initramfs capable to boot live systems as those created by make-live. This includes the Debian-Live isos, netboot tarballs, and usb stick images and Ubuntu live cds. At boot time it will look for a (read-only) media containing a "/casper" directory where a root filesystems (often a compressed squashfs) is stored. If found, it will create a writable environment, using unionfs, for debian like systems to boot from.
+
+.SH RECOGNIZED BOOT OPTIONS
+.TP
+.B live-getty
+This enables a special "serial" login shell (experimental).
+.TP
+.B xdebconf
+uses xdebconfigurator, if present on the rootfs, to configure X instead of the standard procedure (experimental).
+.TP
+.BI "hostname=" HOSTNAME " , userfullname=" USERFULLNAME " , username=" USERNAME
+Those parameters lets you override values read from the config file.
+.TP
+.BI "{keyb|kbd-chooser/method}=" KEYBOARD " , {klayout|console-setup/layoutcode}=" LAYOUT " , {kvariant|console-setup/variantcode}=" VARIANT " , {kmodel|console-setup/modelcode}=" CODE " , koptions=" OPTIONS
+Configure the running keyboard as specified, if this one misses casper behaves as if "keyb=us" was specified. It will be interfered from "locale=" if locale is only 2 lowecase letters as a special case. You could also specify console layout, variant, code, and options (no defaults).
+.TP
+.BI ip= IFACE,ADDRESS,NETMASK,GATEWAY [ :IFACE,ADDRESS,NETMASK,GATEWAY "]*"
+Let you specify the name(s) and the options of the interface(s) that should be configured at boot time. Do not specify this if you want to use dhcp (default).
+.TP
+.BR ip[= frommedia ]
+If this variable is set, dhcp and static configuration are just skipped and the system will use the (must be) media-preconfigured /etc/network/interfaces instead.
+.TP
+.BI "{live-media|bootfrom}=" DEVICE
+If you specify one of this two equivalent forms, casper will first try to find this device for the "/casper" directory where the read-only root filesystem should reside. If it did not find something usable, the normal scan for block devices is performed.
+.TP
+.BI "live-media-offset=" BYTES
+This way you could tell casper that your image starts at offset BYTES in the above specified or autodiscovered device, this could be useful to hide the debian-live iso or image inside another iso or image, to create "clean" images.
+.TP
+.BI "locale=" LOCALE " | debian-installer/locale=" LOCALE
+Configure the running locale as specified, if not present the live-media rootfs configured locale will be used and if also this one misses casper behave as "locale=en_US.UTF-8" was specified. If only 2 lowercase letter are specified (like "it"), the "maybe wanted" locale is generated (like it:IT.UTF-8), in this case if also "keyb=" is unspecified is set with those 2 lowercase letters (keyb=it).
+.TP
+.BR "netboot[=" nfs "|" cifs ]
+This tells casper to perform a network mount. The parameter "nfsroot=" (with optional "nfsopts="), should specify where is the location of the root filesystem. With no args, will try cifs first, and if it fails nfs.
+.TP
+.B persistent
+Casper will look for persistent and snapshot partitions or files labeled "casper-rw", "home-rw", and files called "casper-sn*", "home-sn*" and will try to, in order: mount as /cow the first, mount the second in /home, and just copy the contents of the latter in appropriate locations (snapshots). Snapshots will be tried to be updated on reboot/shutdown. Look at live-snapshot(1) for more informations.
+.TP
+.B nopersistent
+disables the above mentioned "persistent" feature, useful if the bootloader (like syslinux) has been installed with persistent enabled.
+.TP
+.B "showmounts"
+This parameter will make casper to show on "/" the ro filesystems (mostly compressed) on /casper. This is not enabled by default because could lead to problems by applications like "mono" which store binary paths on installation.
+.TP
+.BI "todisk=" DEVICE
+Adding this parameter, casper will try to copy the entire read-only media to the specified device before mounting the root filesystem. It probably needs a lot of free space. Subsequent boots should then skip this step and just specify the "live-media=DEVICE" boot parameter with the same DEVICE used this time.
+.TP
+.B toram
+Adding this parameter, casper will try to copy the whole read-only media to the computer's RAM before mounting the root filesystem. This could need a lot of ram, according to the space used by the read-only media.
+.TP
+.BI "{preseed/file|file}=" FILE
+A path to a file present on the rootfs could be used to preseed debconf database.
+.TP
+.BI "package/question=" VALUE
+All debian installed packages could be preseeded from command-line that way, beware of blanks spaces, they will interfere with parsing, use a preseed file in this case.
+
+.SH FILES
+.B /etc/live.conf
+some variables can be configured via this config file.
+
+.SH BUGS
+.B casper
+works fully on amd64, i386 and ppc, it should also run on other archs.
+
+.SH HOMEPAGE
+Debian Live project <http://live.debian.net/>
+
+.SH SEE ALSO
+.BR live-snapshot(1), initramfs-tools(8), make-live(8), make-live.conf(5)
+
+.SH AUTHOR
+casper was written by Tollen Fog Heen <tfheen@canonical.com>, Matt Zimmerman <mdz@canonical.com>, and Marco Amadori <marco.amadori@gmail.com>.
+.TP
+This manual page was written by Marco Amadori <marco.amadori@gmail.com>,
+for the Debian project (but may be used by others).