LiveDistro

"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

"The Crocodile project aims to cross-compile Debian from scratch by using Scratchbox. Currently the essential packages of the Sarge distribution can be built for the ARM (little-endian) architecture. Support for the MIPS (big-endian) and CRIS architectures is under development."

http://www.scratchbox.org/wiki/Crocodile

"Relax and Recover (abbreviated ReaR) is a highly modular disaster recovery framework for GNU/Linux based systems, but can be easily extended to other UNIX alike systems. The disaster recovery information (and maybe the backups) can be stored on the network, USB devices and DVD/CD-R. The result is bootable rescue system that can be booted via PXE, DVD/CD and USB media.

The rear project is a spin-off of two existing projects:

* OpenVPN Gateway Builder (OGB) of Schlomo Schapiro, and
* Make CD-ROM Recovery (mkCDrec) of Gratien D'haese

We had the idea to take the best of both worlds. The modular concept of OGB and the disaster recovery part of mkCDrec. We are proud that we were able to release rear v1.0 with a few weeks of coding. That was only possible due to strict modular design and seperating duties within the design and coding.

We can only hope that we can/may inspire other developers to jump on our disaster recovery project and help us to improve and deliver new plug-ins.

Now, one and a half years later, we are proud to release rear 1.6 amongst the knowledge that Relax & Recover is used by a growing community of end-users and contributors.

Purpose and Key Features

* Focus on Disaster Recovery, not backup
* Modular concept easy to extend with new features
* For Linux and other Unix-like operations systems
* No external dependancies - use only standard software supplied with the distribution
* Linux: kernel > 2.6 supported (no kernel 2.2/2.4 support !)
* User friendly - minimal output, use log file for error messages and details
* Designed with enterprise environments and security issues in mind

The aim is to make rear as least demanding as possible, it will require only the applications neccessary to fulfill the job rear is configured for. All other applications will be copied to the rescue system if they are present.

License

rear is licensed under the GNU General Public License"

http://rear.sourceforge.net/

"Moblin Image Creator is a tool aimed at making life easier for the mobile and embedded developer. The tool is designed to be extremely flexible with platform-specific knowledge isolated to a platform definition. Initial focus is on a new class of devices known as Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), but the design of Moblin Image Creator is not MID-specific and talk is already underway to add new platform definitions to build consumer electronics stacks, such as TV set-top boxes.

Note: Previously, "Moblin Image Creator" was called "Project Builder", so you may see references to the old name in the documentation and source code.

There are three fundamental features that Moblin Image Creator provides:

* creating a platform-specific build-environment, or "project"
* creating a platform-specific target file-system
* providing user selectable "feature sets" (or fsets) to install bundles of packages that provide some high-level functionality

For more details on projects, targets, fsets, and images, click here."

http://moblin.org/projects/projects_image-...

http://www.moblin.org/repos/tools/moblin-i...

"SystemImager is software which automates Linux installs, software distribution, and production deployment.

SystemImager makes it easy to do automated installs (clones), software distribution, content or data distribution, configuration changes, and operating system updates to your network of Linux machines. You can even update from one Linux release version to another!

It can also be used to ensure safe production deployments. By saving your current production image before updating to your new production image, you have a highly reliable contingency mechanism. If the new production enviroment is found to be flawed, simply roll-back to the last production image with a simple update command!

Some typical environments include: Internet server farms, database server farms, high performance clusters, computer labs, and corporate desktop environments."

http://systemimager.org/

"The liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool for easily installing live operating systems on to USB flash drives.

Features

* Supports downloading various Fedora releases, including Fedora 9!
* Persistent overlay creation (only works with Fedora 9 right now). This lets you to allocate extra space on your USB stick, allowing you to save files and make modifications to your live operating system that will persist after you reboot. This essentially lets you carry your own personalized Fedora with you at all times
* SHA1 checksum verification of known releases, to ensure that you've downloaded the correct bits"

https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator

"OpenEmbedded is a full-featured development environment allowing users to target a wide variety of devices. Supporting multiple build, release paths and configurations, OpenEmbedded extends the capabilities of your build and release engineers. OpenEmbedded uses compilation and configuration caching at most levels to increase developer productivity. [...]

OpenEmbedded is a tool which allows developers to create a fully usable Linux base for various embedded systems. It has been designed to be able to handle different hardware architectures, support multiple releases for those architectures, and utilize tools for speeding up the process of recreating the base after changes have been made. Currently it can run on any Linux distribution, and plans are in place to allow it to work under Windows.

OpenEmbedded is the successor of the great OpenZaurus project. Basically OpenEmbedded is a build system that can generate (cross-compile) Software packages for embedded targets. This may include Bootloader, Linux and Applications. It started as a dream and BrainStorming, on how this could be done, and it's already used in real life."

http://oe.linuxtogo.org/

http://oe.linuxtogo.org/project-overview

"The purpose of 'zdisk' is to put a kernel of your choice and a rescue system on one 1.44mb"

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/re...

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/re...