X-evian is a Live-CD, a complete operating system which installs automatically from the CD-Rom in RAM memory by means of a process of automatic hardware detection.

This makes it possible to "parasite" a PC without leaving any trace?without touching the hard disk and without interfering with the operating system or the files already installed on the PC. X-evian also includes a utility for installing the contents of the CD automatically onto the hard disk (without having to erase Windows).

Debian GNU/Linux is much more than an operating system: it is an entire system of program distribution, installation and management built around the Linux kernel (the core of the operating system). Debian GNU/Linux consists of about 10,000 different programs, nearly all of which are free software, bundled and classified for integrated operation.

X-evian is a selection and compilation which has been carefully chosen and configured for activist users, for liberated cultural, technological and social production. But Debian is much more than "a complete operating system and an infinite number of programs".

Debian is the largest independent free software community on the Net and one of the most firmly established and stable techno-political projects in cyberspace. X-evian is an easy preconfigured way of introducing the user to the best of the resources of this Debian.

The power of digital recombination, reproduction and transmission has enabled the cognitariat (the workers of the immaterial production networks) to organise its own production transversally. But this transverse self-organisation would not have been possible without a format that would protect the collective work.

This is copyleft. "Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free. The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions?but not permission to add restrictions of their own.? Stallman, R. (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html).

Copyleft hacks into the legal system of copyright to champion the freedom of knowledges and techniques. X-evian is the product of the recombination, copying and transformation of these knowledges. X-evian can therefore be freely copied, distributed, modified, recombined and used (provided any modification is also free).

But it's not only the software that can be copylefted: the design, images, texts, technical documents, music and videos included in X-evian are also free. X-evian therefore forms part of the cycles of immaterial production, liberated from the info-capitalist restriction on the circulation of knowledges and techniques, and its devices of production and consumption (factories, companies, shopping centres, etc.).

Liberated immaterial production does not operate along the lines of the development-production-sale-consumption sequence, but rather follows interactive cycles of development-use-development, looped in backfed hypercycles of projects, groups and individuals (X-evian, metabolik, hacklabs, sindominio, Debian, Linux, etc...).

X-evian is therefore also a community of development and experimentation from free software towards a different technological, cultural and social model, in which production and use merge in cooperative horizontal communities working outside market interfaces, innovation restricted by patents and commercial interests and the consumerist use of technology.

This edition of X-evian seeks to explicitly support copyleft philosophy, motivations and practices, and therefore includes an organised selection of copyleft materials (chats, texts, manuals, etc.).