HOWTOs

"* This script can be run using any debian based distro, including the Knoppix 5.1 (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/ind...) boot cd.

* This has been updated by: Rickbronson 20:43, 24 Apr 2007 (GMT)

* Knoppix Sources http://debian-knoppix.alioth.debian.org/

* Please note that this howto is not without a few flaws, please revise and suggest as necessary.

* Debian Releases:
o etch (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/) = stable realease
o lenny (http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/) = testing release
o sid (http://www.debian.org/releases/unstable/) = unstable release"

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Debootstrap_to...

"The TorK project offers a CD that allows you to use TorK on any computer. [...]

The rest of this document shows you how the CD was created. It is based on the remastering howto available at knoppix.net. [...]

Creating a Live CD involves the following steps:

* Copying various portions of the CD to two separate folders on a hard drive.
* Modifying the copied contents to suit your purposes.
* Rolling your modified contents into a new disk image and writing the image to a CD."

http://tork.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php...

"This article aims to document the process of creating a customized Ubuntu that loads an image from the hard disk to RAM, then boots an entire Ubuntu session out of RAM. It is intended for intermediate to advanced Ubuntu users who are familiar with the shell, and may have limited experience customizing the livecd (LiveCDCustomization) and shell scripting. We will customize a LiveCD and copy it to the hard drive, and make a few modifications to bootup scripts so that it copies to RAM via our good friend tmpfs. [...]

Use Cases

There are many cases where one would like to boot Ubuntu to RAM:

* Performance: The desktop performance is dramatically improved. A 400MB squashed filesystem in RAM, that holds 1200MB of data, is read back on a 1.6GHz Core Duo in about 3 seconds, including decompression time.

* Power, Noise, Durability: Although modern hard disks don't use much power compared to other system components, this may still be important for some. In laptops, hard disks are often the noisiest components, so this setup can reduce system noise. With the hard disk spun down, a laptop can potentially withstand greater shocks without damage.

* Abrupt poweroff: Since the hard disk is only momentarily used in read-only mode during boot, then never touched again, there are few or no negative consequences of an abrupt poweroff. If a system is used where power is inconsistent, or the system is regularly used in a context where fast shutoffs are required, this is very handy.

* Privacy: Anything you do in this session are lost when you reboot or power off. This is great for kiosks or other systems where permanent modification are not desired. (Note that by default the livecd user has full sudo access, so potentially a malicious user can still make permanent changes by mounting the hard drive and following this HOWTO)"

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootToRAM

"On this page you will find technical documentation regarding the creation of UBLinux 4. [...]

The Distribution

* Creating UBLinux
1. Selecting Packages
2. Creating the Distribution
3. Editing the Boot Disk
4. Customizing Anaconda
5. Creating the Kickstart
6. Making the ISOs"

http://wings.buffalo.edu/computing/ublinux/

"If you don't want any custom features you can just use the official CentOS 4 Live CD, but if you want to add custom software, this procedure will show you how to build a minimal live CD and then add your own software. This procedure was written for use on a CentOS-4 box but anything with yum 2.4 should work."

http://www.byteclub.net/wiki/CentOS_Live

"These instructions will help you take Gentoo 2005.1-r1 and make a single initrd file which can be booted with PXE. The basic principle is that the squashfs root is put inside the initrd and mounted from there rather than directly from a CD.

Where possible, this will be done without the need to be root on your linux box.

This technique is also used for CentOS_Live PXE."

http://www.byteclub.net/wiki/Gentoo_live

"The build scripts provided here should allow you to build your own Scientific Linux Live CD. This scripts (with some modifications) are also used to build the CentOS 4 Live CD. You can either install Scientific Linux on a normal PC and use this system as a build system for your livecd. Or you can build the LiveCD in a chroot environment as described below."

http://linux.web.psi.ch/livecd/build.html

"1.2. Create a new ISO image

mkisofs is the required tool. It's a part of cdrecord.

1.2.1. Download and extract

You have to download the file ploplinux-v3.5.5.tar.gz to your home directory.
Then extract the downloaded file.

tar xfvz ploplinux-v3.5.5.tar.gz

1.2.2. Adding files

The directory ploplinux-v3.5.5/ with the PLoP Linux directories and files is created and you can add your personal files and the Avast files to the pluspacks/ directory. Personal scripts should be placed in ploplinux/myscripts/. [...]"

http://www.plop.at/en/ploplinux.html#licre...

"openSUSE KIWI toolkit is fantastic piece of work, congratulations to all the developers involved in creating this software. This is my first encounter with KIWI and I must say it rocks!

With KIWI we can build anything from live CD/DVD, thin client images, xen and other vm images to custom distributions.

Here is a short how to KIWI live, they are the things that I did to create my very first Live distro: XFCE based openSUSE 10.2."

http://dev.beryl-project.org/~cyberorg/sus...

"During distribution development we would like to offer the possibility to create live systems on DVD. The goal is to have a working live system in place as soon as the distribution is finished. Bugs found and fixed concerning the live system image type are automatically fixed for other image types when build from the same source. In order to create your own live system based on the current openSUSE stable tree the following steps needs to be performed:"

http://en.opensuse.org/LiveDVD