2009/1/23 Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Eric Martin <freak4uxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>    From a thread on another list (pro-audio/music oriented) we're
>> thinking about creating our own Live CD. I'd like this at least
>> initially to be based on Gentoo. Are there any good, up-to-date
>> instructions around about how to do this?
>>
>>    In Google Books I found something called "Linux Live CDs:Building
>> and Customizing Bootables". It had the following link which is dead.
>> Did it move somewhere? I cannot find it yet.
>>
>> http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_build_a_LiveCD_from_Scratch
>>
>>    I found this in the forums. Any idea about how well it might work?
>>
>> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=244837
>>
>>    There's a section talking about Catalyst. The first thing is says
>> is that it's not for the casual user. On a scale of 1-10 how difficult
>> is something like this? (I suspect that if I have to ask it's too
>> difficult.) ;-)
>>
>>    Also this for general info:
>>
>> http://www.livecdlist.com/wiki/index.php/LiveCD_Creation_Resources
>>
>>    Most interesting to me would be something like cloning an already
>> up-and-running system. Is that possible?
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Mark
>>
>
> Cloning a live system is pretty easy. I'm using a live usb boot device
> based off of the gentoo-amd64 minimal cd (and I'm adding more as I go).
>  The liveUSB howto [1] on docs.gentoo.org is great and will answer most
> questions.
>
> [1] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/liveusb.xml
> --
> Eric Martin
> Key fingerprint = D1C4 086E DBB5 C18E 6FDA  B215 6A25 7174 A941 3B9F

Thanks Eric. I hadn't considered doing it on a USB drive but that's an
interesting idea and the instructions don't look too bad.

Cheers,
Mark


Catalyst is quite a beast to get used to, its not well documented and doesnt always behave as you might hope, that said, once you have a working config it becomes *very* easy to then rebuild your livecd with updated packages. The best way to figure things out with it is to look at the examples provided and then look at actual implementations by checking out the config files used by the devs to build the gentoo media, and also the configs used to build the sysresccd.

Its taken me a couple of weeks of occasional fiddling but im now able to build my own livecd using catalyst, the sysrescd configs as a base of useful programs to install, and then updated them all to build from ~ARCH and use the funtoo portage tree. My only problem now that im figuring out is how to use the script in the sysrescd repo to combine the x86 and amd64 cds into one unified final cd.

- Nick