How to make a live CD/DVD from your harddisk installation

[Fragadelic]

Fragadelic, I hope you can help solve people problems that I don't have an answer for if your time permit.

I'll check back in the thread as I can and try to help where I can.

casper is very picky about a lot of things - lol.

One thing you might want to add is that mkisofs has a limit of 4.7GB so if the system is too large, it will not create the iso file. Haven't found a way around that yet.

For those that find this prodecure a bit daunting, please feel free to try remastersys as it does this very thing from a simple gui without the need to copy the entire system to a temp area.

[Fragadelic]

i followed your guide to the letter, but when i start the live cd, it loads the gnome desktop, then 5 seconds later bumps me back to the GDM login screen, and says user ubuntu will start in 10 seconds, logs in again and kicks back out, not sure what happend

Try going to a console term window and see if it is with gdm or not.

CTRL-ALT-F1

then take a look at the /var/log/gdm log files and see if there are any errors.

[capink]

I saw your bit about the grub splash after I posted - lol.

Remastersys right now is using bash and zenity or kdialog for the gui frontend and now that I have things working pretty well, I will start to learn python myself and might convert it over.

I was thinking about learning kdialog or ssft to add gui to my bash scripts. But since my next project (a private one) will need a full blown gui I decided that I will try learning pyqt.

I've been doing bash for so long and just find it easy to do and it works for what I need so I just went with it. Its also easier for folks just starting with linux scripting to take a look at and see how I did certain things.

Yes bash scripts are beautiful. And since casper itself is written in bash, it makes sense to use it for remastersys.

Please feel free to take a look at remastersys and let me know if you have any suggestions. I still have some cleanup to do but it works pretty well so far on a number of system. It was originally created on Kubuntu and Mint but I now use Klikit-Linux(Kubuntu based) and am part of the team there.

I will defenitely look at remastersys and report back to you. By the way, this is the first time I know about Klikit-Linux. How is different from Kubuntu? I plan to switch into a good kde distro once 4.1 is released.

/etc/shadow and /etc/gshadow can stay as long as the normal users are cleaned out of it. You can check /usr/bin/remastersys after you install it to see how I did it. I got my info for the checks directly from how casper looks to see before it creates the livecd user.

I will check /usr/bin/remastersys. But do you think it would be much different to keep the files? I think the ubuntu installer recreate these files anyway (I don't know how but I think it uses the commands pwconv & grpconv).

Your howto deserves a webpage and not just to be here in the forum where it might get lost.

Let me know if you would like me to put it up on my website and then you can just give the link to folks.

Unfortunately I don't have a webpage. But it would be really nice if you hosted this guide on your website.

One thing you might want to add is that mkisofs has a limit of 4.7GB so if the system is too large, it will not create the iso file. Haven't found a way around that yet.

The main problem for me is that ISO9660 cannot support single files larger than 4 GB. So the squashfs cannot be more than 4 GB.

Using udf is not possible because it is not supported by casper nor live-initramfs. But is not the main problem (As casper scripts can possilbly be modified to handle udf), the real showstopper here is that grub does not support booting from udf.

The only option remaining is to not create a squashfs. But to place the system in folder called /casper/squashfs.dir. This is supposedly supported by casper (by looking at the casper main scirpt it looks like it is possible but I have not tried it yet). But the problem here is does iso9660 support essential features of unix filesystems like symlinks, permissions and ownership?. On my system I'm able to create an ISO > 4.7 Gb using the original mkisofs (instead of the symlink created by genisoimage).

[stumpalump]

No you cannot use udf as it is not supported for the time being (neither casper not live-initramfs supports it). But you do not need to use udf becuase after compressing your system into a squashfs it will be about 2.7 GB.

Okay well I kinda wanted to use ext2 rather than squash. Didn't you say that would make the disc run faster? So I kinda wanted to use that for loading times.

So I thought of maybe trying this

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=${CD}/${FS_DIR}/filesystem.${FORMAT} bs=1024 count=7000000

And then somehow making a bootable udf out of the output. I know Nero can make udf discs and bootable DVDs but I couldn't merge the two...

Anyone have any ideas?

[capink]

Okay well I kinda wanted to use ext2 rather than squash. Didn't you say that would make the disc run faster? So I kinda wanted to use that for loading times.

So I thought of maybe trying this

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=${CD}/${FS_DIR}/filesystem.${FORMAT} bs=1024 count=7000000

And then somehow making a bootable udf out of the output. I know Nero can make udf discs and bootable DVDs but I couldn't merge the two...

Anyone have any ideas?

Well, the recent updates to the guide suggested using uncompressed squashfs (by adding the -noI -noD -noF switches to mksquashfs) instead of ext2 and you would sitll get the same performance. You can still use ext2 if you want, but advantage to use an uncompressed squashfs is that you will not need to create a virtual filesystem.

The main problem preventing us from making a cd in UDF format is that grub does not support booting from a UDF image.

[stumpalump]

Okay, so I've done it with an uncompressed squashfs. Now, for some reason, when I try to make the actual iso, it goes through and does it but I can't find the file???

EDIT: Nevermind it was in root folder.

[Fragadelic]

capink - here is this howto on my webspace:

http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/capink.html

There is a link to it from the bottom of my webpage as well.

http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/

I left it in a more printer friendly format so folks can print it out if they want to.

[stumpalump]

Okay, so when I made my DVD, I copied all the user settings over, but I didn't see anything that looked like my settings at all. I was kinda hoping that the DVD would boot and it would have my gtk/emerald theme, my menus, my awn etc...

Anyone know how I can do this?

[capink]

To preserve your settings you need to:

1. Konw exactly what are the files that store these settings (This is sometime tricky depending on the program). Note that if you are storing the themes in your home directory they also have to be copied along with the config files. I keep all my themes and graphics in a system wide directories to make them available to all users.

2. These files are not copied to the home directory of your live CD. they are copied to the /etc/skel of the live cd (${WORK}/rootfs/etc/skel) as explained in the optional part of step. B



If you are not able to determine what are the files that carry these config files, One solution is to copy all the config files in your home directory by replacing the optional commad in step B with this command:

cd $HOME && find . -type f | grep '^\./\.' \
| grep -vi -e 'cache' -e 'thumbnail' -e 'log' -e 'trash' \
-e 'history' -e 'snapshot' -e 'tmp' -e 'temp' -e \
'serverauth' -e 'ICEauthority'\
| while read file; do sudo cp -v --parents --preserve=mode $file ${WORK}/rootfs/etc/skel; done

[stumpalump]

I have all my themes saved on a different hard disk. So what you're saying is I would also have to copy the tar files over as well?

Do you happen to know where exactly the config file is that points to the tar files and all that?