Custom LiveCD Internet Kiosk - was Re: Ethereal

[Jason D. Clinton]

On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 09:41 -0600, Brian Kelsay wrote:
> 
> And then there is the old standby of remastering your own Knoppix:
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8081
> there are other articles on this.  Google "knoppix remaster howto" or
> substitute in your LiveCD distro you want to start with. 

"Remastering" is nothing more than process of extracting the ISO,
modifying it, and re-compressing it. It can be done with any Live CD
including Debian Live. Most of the instructions you will find using
Brian's Google query are generic enough to use anywhere.

However, there is a better way.

The beauty of Debian Live is that off-the-shelf packages do not need any
specialization to work with the ramdisk environment. In the Knoppix
world, they take Debian packages and heavily modify their /etc/init.d
scripts to come up with the KNOPPIX boot sequence - this includes
fundamental changes to the standard hardware detection stuff done in a
regular Linux distro. In the Debian Live case, we mount a normal Debian
root filesystem image, modify it to be "live" in RAM, and then hand
control off to the normal /new_root/sbin/init and it boots as though
it's running from a hard disk as it normally would. This means that
almost no effort is required to get any software in the Debian
repositories (57,000+ packages) to work in the Live environment.

And that's to say nothing of the benefit of having a good, clean rootfs
directory built from the latest repositories to begin with; no need to
go through a decompression process.

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