Build Tools

"The bootable USB live Linux creator. Live USB drives -- pen, thumb, SD, MMC or even phones with USB Mass Storage support -- created with this tool let you use the empty disk space on Windows, Linux and Mac, remember the changes you make across reboots, and boot other operating systems. No other tool comes close."

http://rudd-o.com/new-projects/portablelinux

"Complete DVD containing all the resources required to create all 3 versions of Sugar-on-a-Stick without requiring Internet access."

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Sugar... 4.3GB
http://people.sugarlabs.org/Tgillard/Sugar...

"Buildrom is a tool that can construct a coreboot image (comprising the coreboot loader and payload) from scratch.

Starting from a configuration file, it will download and build all the code necessary to construct the final binary."

http://www.coreboot.org/Buildrom

"Moblin Image Creator 2 (MIC2) is a tool for creating and manipulating Moblin images. MIC2 is a series of utilities that create customized images and provides an easy-to-use development environment for the Moblin distribution. MIC2 is NOT based on MIC 1.0 and is a completely new tool primarily based on Fedora LIVE CD tools and other open source projects
Status

Currently MIC2 is command line only. A GUI version is underway and still in the early stages of development.
Features

MIC2 supports the following features:

* MIC2 has three major utilities
o moblin-image-creator for image creation
o moblin-image-convertoer for image transformation
o moblin-chroot for generating chroot environment from image and vice vera
* MIC2 supports major Linux distributions and can be used on at least the following distributions:
o Fedora (Fedora 9 and above)
o Opensuse (> OpenSUSE 10.3)
o Ubuntu (Ubuntu 8.10. MIC2 is not supported on Ubuntu 8.04 due to incompatible yum versions)
* Supports various types of images:
o Live CD
o Live USB
o Loop images
o KVM images
o VMDK (Vmware)
* Uses the kickstart configuration format for image configuration. Using this simple format, you can specify which software repositories to use, and which packages to install and configure the system, using basic built-in and Moblin specific system configuration directives."

http://moblin.org/projects/moblin-image-cr...

http://moblin.org/documentation

"debirf is a system that will create diskless, all-in-ram images (kernel and initramfs) that boot entirely into ram and leave the user in a fully functional Debian system.

debirf has a module architecture that allows users to easily customize the images that they build, using simple shell scripts, to do basically anything the Debian can do. Some included examples "profiles" are:

* minimal: very minimal system with no extras
* rescue: includes a full complement of system repair utilities, including mdadm, lvm2, testdisk, foremost, etc
* xkiosk: run a simple clean GUI web browser for public-access web browsing

Debirf is made publicly available under the GNU General Public License."

http://cmrg.fifthhorseman.net/wiki/debirf

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/debirf

"FUSBi, the Free USB Installer, downloads free GNU/Linux Distributions for you and creates bootable USB images.

FUSBi supports automated installation of of all the FSF-endorsed Free Software GNU/Linux Distributions, such as gNewSense, UTUTO, Dynebolic, Musix GNU+Linux, BLAG and GNUstep. You can also use it with your local image files.

FUSBi is a Free Software itself and is licensed under GNU General Public License version 3 or later."

http://www.aligunduz.org/FUSBi/

http://www.aligunduz.org/FUSBi/releases/

"grml officially supports booting from usb-stick with all grml flavours. [...]

Prepare system

* Get the grml iso
* Mount the iso loopback (e.g. mount -o loop grml_small_0.4.iso /mnt/grml-iso)
* Make FAT16 filesystem on the usbstick (e.g. mkfs.vfat -F 16 -v /dev/sda1)
* Mount the usbstick (e.g. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/external1)
* Copy everything to the usbstick (e.g. cp -r /mnt/grml-iso/* /mnt/external1).
* Move all files from /mnt/external1/boot/isolinux/ (mv /mnt/external1/boot/isolinux/* /mnt/external1) and the files linux26 and the minirt.gz (since grml1.1: initrd.gz!) from the directory named like the grml-flavour (/boot/grml, /boot/grmlmedium, /boot/grml64,...) to root of usb-stick
* Umount the usbstick and the grml-iso
* Run syslinux on the usbstick (e.g. syslinux /dev/sda1)
* Check if the usbstick has an valid mbr, else dd if=mbr.bin of=/dev/sda (mbr.bin is in the syslinux package, usually installed in /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin)
* may need to set the bootable flag using parted (or fdisk)"

http://hg.grml.org/grml2usb/raw-file/tip/g...

http://wiki.grml.org/doku.php?id=usb

"This tool is a YaST user interface for the KIWI imaging tool. It is aimed to provide easy way to configure your image configurations, suitable for kiwi. Once you create such configuration with YaST, you can save it and later build an image from it manually with kiwi, or you can run kiwi directly from the YaST module. It is possible to create new configuration from scratch, as well as importing existing one and modify its settings.

YaST Image Creator is part of yast2-product-creator package."

http://en.opensuse.org/YaST/Modules/Image_...

"A tool for building complete Linux filesystem images

Rootstrap was originally written to provide a facility for building filesystems for use with User-mode Linux, but can be useful in other applications as well.

It uses a modular set of shell scripts to create the filesystem image, install a base system, and customize it for a particular application. Currently, it only builds Debian systems, but the architecture is such that other base systems could be used instead.

Use of rootstrap does not require root access, or special privileges of any kind. This is because it builds the filesystem inside a User-mode Linux system running under an unprivileged uid.

Filesystem creation with rootstrap is quick and painless. With a local mirror and a single command, a fresh Debian filesystem can be created in about 3 minutes on relatively modest hardware."

http://packages.debian.org/source/rootstrap

"a little python script, live-xmaker.

Live-xmaker is a command line front-end to live-helper, inspired by morphix-mmaker[4][5] (written by Alex de Landgraaf). This allows all the configurations for a liveCD build to be specified in one XML file. [...]

I plan to update live-xmaker with all the possible options available via live-helper [...]

This script is licensed under the GNU GPL v2 or later."

Feedback is very welcome. I have also cc'ed the morphix-developers mailing list as it may pique the interest of follow morphers."

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/d...

http://autotesting.livecd.org/cgi-bin/gitw...

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive