Re: knoppix/bootcd like software?

[Niall Young <niall@chime.net.au>]

> anyway, i'm brought to wonder if there is any software out there (and if
> any of it is debian-packaged) for making your own live-on-cd debian
> mini-distros.  i think it'd be sweet to have a program that would take
> a file with list of packages, and install them + dependencies + base
> onto a bootable cd.  the automagic configuration that knoppix has would
> be nice too.

I showed something similar at the Debian mini-conf at LCA.  FAI is a
non-interactive network installer.  I've stuck it onto a CD and the
same tools used to build it are perfect for building live CDs - that's
where I'm heading next when I have time, a more generic toolkit to build
Debian appliance/flavour CDs, and then recombine with FAI (and
eventually di) so you can optionally install it to disk as well as run it
live:

    http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
    http://www.iinet.net.au/~niall/fai/

Take a look at the mkinitrd-cd package.  The version in stable needs a
lot of polishing and didn't quite work out of the box, but it's a great
idea and more contributors would help.  Grub's fallback option is also
very useful.

Niall Young                                    Chime Communications Pty Ltd
niall@chime.net.au                            Level 6, 263 Adelaide Terrace
Ph: (+61) 08 9213 1330 / 0408 192 797         Perth, Western Australia 6000

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