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Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: yourlife on 20 April 2010, 17:16

Title: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: yourlife on 20 April 2010, 17:16: 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.
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: Refalm on 21 April 2010, 13:01: Good luck with that :)

God's speed, Sir.
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: Lead Head on 22 April 2010, 06:01: Debian does not have their own live cd installation iso?
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: Refalm on 22 April 2010, 10:50: Quote from: Lead Head on 22 April 2010, 06:01
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.
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: Refalm on 26 April 2010, 23:11: Some guy named John from Australia pointed out that Debian actually has a LiveCD. Sort of.
http://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD (http://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD)
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: worker201 on 27 April 2010, 01:40: Some guy named John from Australia.

Hmmm.
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: Kintaro on 27 April 2010, 02:06: 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/ (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.
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: Calum on 27 April 2010, 14:30: 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/ (http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/)

i loved it.
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: yourlife on 27 April 2010, 18:23: 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
Title: Re: Debian Remaster HELP!
Post by: Kintaro on 30 April 2010, 18:33: 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.