LiveCD Howto

Mandrake 10.0
Copyright Aerospace Software Ltd, GPL, 2004

Scope

This guide describes how to create a LiveCD from a Mandrake 10.0 distribution. This CD will boot on almost any X86 PC and can be used for devices that do not need, or should not have a hard disk drive, for instance routers and firewalls, Internet Kiosks and the like.

The result is a bootable CDROM based system that cannot be corrupted. If anything gets messed up, reboot the machine and you are in business again.

Speaking of business - this is a great way to make a zero maintenance office system. Configure a desktop machine to work exactly the way it should, burn a CDROM and you never have to revisit that PC again.

General

The LiveCD project is hosted at http://developer.berlios.de and consists of a Perl script that is used to create an ISO file, which can then be burned onto a CDROM.

The LiveCD depends on the Hacker Kernel (kernel-tmb), which is conveniently supplied on CDROM 5 of the Mandrake 10.0 professional package. You need to install from CD or download the following tools, in this order:

kernel-tmb, from CD5
libmesaglut, from CD1
libsmokeqt
busybox
cloop-utils
mediacheck
perl-Qt
squashfs-tools
livecd

With that lot installed and configured, you should be able to make a working CD.

Install

Start off by doing a fresh install of Mandrake on a single root partition that is at least 5GB in size. In addition, you need at least 256MB RAM and a 1GB swap partition.

Install as few things as possible. Note that you need the Gnome libraries for the Mandrake wizards. Watch the dependencies carefully when you try to remove things from the package list. Select a small window manager, such as IceWM to leave you more room for other toys.

The following guidelines are a mix of keeping it small, selecting things that use the same libraries (use GTK, avoid QT), tools that are required to get the job done and tools that are required by other tools:

Remove KDE, Gnome
Select IceWM
Remove Python
Select Perl
Select all Drake tools
Select things with GTK libraries
Remove things using QT libraries
Remove MySQL
Select PostgreSQL
Select Mountloop
Select Ghostscript, XPDF
Select Links, Lynx
Select Apache, Apache modPerl
Select cdparanoia, cdrecord 
Xcdroast is somehow installed by default
Select bind utils
Select ftp, mutt, rsync, telnet, traceroute
Select Gedit
Remove VIM
Remove screen
Select the default fonts
Select foomatic
Remove Samba and NFS
Select proftpd, openssh server
Select postfix
Remove mailman, pop, imap

Once installed, install Galeon, since you can't select it during the install process.

The result will be a system that is about 400MB compressed.

Ensure that you have a good editor, eg. Gedit and a browser, eg. Galeon installed and that networking works with DHCP - keep it straight and simple. Once you have made your first working LiveCD, you can add more things.

Run drakconf and remove the regular kernel, then install the hacker kernel using the software manager. Use the boot manager to configure Lilo with the hacker kernel. Leave only one entry in the boot menu and set the delay to zero. Reboot and make sure everything works as intended. Finally, delete all the rubbish from the /tmp directory, the browser cache, trash can and so on.

Make the LiveCD

Experiment using rewriteable CDs... :-)

Put the LiveCD install_any.pm in /usr/lib/libDrakX and mklivecd and livecd-install in /usr/sbin.

Change directory to /tmp and run:

# mklivecd --verbose --splash=no livecd.iso

When done, use xcdroast to burn the ISO file to a CDRW and La Voila!

Debug: Run mklivecd --help if you can't get going.