Debian Remaster HELP!

[yourlife]

I'm (attempting) to remaster Debian (keep comments to yourself), and I need to A) turn it into a LiveCD and B) Make the LiveCD installable. I don't want to use Knoppix, I wan't to work purely from Debian.

[Refalm]

Good luck with that

God's speed, Sir.

[Lead Head]

Debian does not have their own live cd installation iso?

[Refalm]

Debian does not have their own live cd installation iso?

No, only an installation CD or DVD.

Well, Ubuntu is based on Debian, and it has a LiveCD, so I guess yourlife's work is done.

[Refalm]

Some guy named John from Australia pointed out that Debian actually has a LiveCD. Sort of.
http://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD

[worker201]

Some guy named John from Australia.

Hmmm.

[Kintaro]

A LiveCD isn't rocket science, you can do it many ways. They all basically just create a ramdisk and extract an image of / there. Learning to do it via reverse engineering have looking at the bootloader isn't hard. I wouldn't use Knoppix for that as a beginner, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ was really fun in my youth to rip to shreds to learn about the process. Another one if it is still around is muLinux which is so fucking tiny it fits on a floppy, kinda a golden relic from the ninties. There is also the age old single-floppy distribution called tinfoilhatlinux, ironically that kernel is so old it probably has multiple security vulnerabilities.

[Calum]

my favourite live distro back in the day (because it fully worked on a laptop i had with a 66MHz CPU and 64MB of RAM) is BasicLinux: http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/

i loved it.

[yourlife]

Maybe I need to make this a little clearer, I want to gut Debian (or due to the fact that it's being a bitch, I might just do Linux From Scratch) and I want to turn a full linux install into a liveCD that can be installed on another system

[Kintaro]

Debian installs gutted, the most basic install CD is a couple of hundred meg. You will want to use this, the LiveCD page on the debian wiki above explains how to turn what you create into a LiveCD. You will need a good understanding of the Linux boot process. Personally if I were going to do what you are doing, I would get Knoppix and have a good look at the initrd and /etc/rc which is where all the magic happens when the system boots. Reverse engineering is pretty fun.

Doing a Linux from Scratch is pretty undesirable if you want anything practical out of your system. Another option could be using BSD, as the system is simple to modify. You make any changes you want to /usr/src including even introducing ports to the base system and then 'make build.' FreeBSD already has a LiveCD target. I myself have my own distribution of FreeBSD used internally for servers.