Create a LiveCD

Create a LiveCD Organic Design procedure

Purpose

We'd like to package up our organicdesign-workstation and Ubuntu Post Install configurations into an ISO which can be written onto a DVD or memory stick. This installation would also contain a wiki containing a wiki organisation including all the training material.

If we could also make the media usable from within an existing operating system rather than only working in a bootable way, then it would replace the current implementation of Training on a stick‎. It shouldn't be too difficult to make a single executable binary for each OS which results in a running instance of a wiki organisation.

Method

RemasterSys allows you to convert a Linux system into a LiveCD so that a replica of the system is easily installable by others.

This procedure results in an ISO image which can be written to a DVD or memory stick. It removes the home directories and boots into the desktop as a live session user with all the Ubuntu defaults, so the default installed applications and theme may need to be replaced to customise our distribution the way we want it.

All the databases and daemons in the source installation will be preserved and will be available to the live session user. But some configuration such as /etc/hosts will be returned to the defaults.

Preparing the source installation

The source installation is best as a fresh installation with the required packages installed from our repository. The source installation should be for 32bit architecture since that will also work for 64bit systems.

Building an ISO

Simple run the following command to create an ISO image. You may also wish to set some configuration options in /etc/remastersys.conf first, such as the title of the disc or ISO file and the name of the live session user.

remastersys dist

• download and install remastersys (it's a .deb).
• open remastersys from system/administration/remastersys, and then choose the backup option, this way, all your data, including the contents of home, bookmarks, homepage and customized options of the programs are included in the .iso. If you choose the dist option instead, all the programs will have the default settings and no personal info is stored.
• You will now have a .iso which can be burned to DVD in the usual way (it will probably be too big for CD).

Maintaining Distro's

To maintain a functioning distro, we need to have a running machine for each which is a pure installation containing nothing but the package and its subsequent default configuration. To do this we're using Sun's open source [http://www.virtualbox.org VirtualBox software so that we effectively have a dedicated computer for each distro and supported architecture. Each of these virtual boxes can be kept up to date the usual way and have ISO's generated on a regular basis to be made available on the OD site.