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Hi all, just getting started with arch this week.
In my programming labs at school the teacher has given us ubuntu live CDs (slightly customized) to do our coursework. I'm familiar with Ubuntu, but I find it's not very friendly in the sense that it gives you so many things (many of which you don't need), and the pile of kruft seems to make it difficult to install things in any way other than "the ubuntu way". I haven't had much luck customizing ubuntu live images (mostly because there are some things I really don't like about Ubuntu). I'm thinking Arch would allow a more straightforward approach.
So I'll be installing Arch this week (tried Gentoo, and it killed me). I've been looking at different ways of customizing LIVE CDs: mkarchiso, larch, something with poison in the name. Which would be the best if I wanted to create a live environment with xmonad, a couple tools like gvim and gparted, and add my own graphical/colour/config customizations?
I saw with mkarchiso you use an overlay to have files moved from /etc/skel into the root filesystem, but I'm not sure if I understood that correctly. Would there be a way to simply set up an arch install as I like it, and then fire off a single script to make the ISO a clone of my currently running system? Or is it more complicated than that?
The impression I got from larch and mkarchiso is that they were for building a system up from the bottom, but I'm wondering if anything is available to simply clone an existing installation as a live image.
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Hi and welcome,
I have very limited experiences and just with Archiso, so I can't give advice which other apps may or may not fit your needs better.
But, regarding Archiso: the overlay dir is as a whole for moving files to the root filesystem after every packages have been installed to it (according to the file packages.list). So it should contain the files (e.g. configs) which should be different from the one you get from the original package. The overlay/etc/skel dir is for a set of files which are to be copied to the user's home directory after it is created. So it should contain files like e.g. a personal .bashrc. ("Hardcoding" them to overlay/home/youruser/* should be avoided due to permission concerns.)
As far as I know there is no automatic cloning tool. There are definitely some files that have to be modified—preferably by hand. /etc/fstab is maybe the most obvious example if you would like to use your LIVE CD on other machines too, but there are some others as well. You will also need some code to add a user at boot.
Maybe a possible start for a semi-automatic cloning:
# packages -Q | awk '{print $1}' > packages.listCopy every files that have ever been modified from the root partition to overlay.
Copy every files that you may need from your home to overlay/etc/skel.
Apply needed modifications, and then whatever, see the guide.
Good luck.
“First principle, Clarice. Simplicity” – Dr. Hannibal Lecter
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Hi,
That is a good start, but you really should use the -t option, otherwise, you'll be installing dependencies directly and you don't want that, you just want them to install other packages:
pacman -Qt
Walter
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Customizing can be done in CTKArchLive using addons.
It is ready made and can run all in ram.
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