Recently, I’ve been wanting to make a custom live iso with a couple of tools that I need but I really don’t know where to start or what to do… any help?
E: I didn’t phrase my post correctly, I need a portable set of desktop tools for development, running on the gnome desktop
Just a thought, but live systems are usually just a packed fs like squashfs in an iso with syslinux. Loop mount your image, copy the files out, start a chroot to use a package manager if you want, pack up the modified system back into squashfs, copy to the iso, run syslinux if you need to change the config, aaand your image is now modified 😹 a lot easier said than done, but maybe an interesting excursion.
We need a little more info than that.
Like, what OS? What other tools? Why does it need to be custom, can’t you just install the tools on the installed system? Why do you need a live session/ISO, if you plan on having it installed on persistant storage anyway?
I’m not particular about the distro, I just want something stable so there I don’t have to re-make it, that supports Wayland. As for why I want it as an iso, portability, I wanna be able to take it and flash it at will. As for the tools, partitioning tools vscode and dotnet is all I need
NixOS might be a particularly elegant solution to make that image reproducible and you could even do version control to get it just right.
I’d love to use NixOS, but it’s way too complicated for me, and the documentation sucks…
Just use Puppy Linux. Puppy creates a r/w overlay file which can be updated with any changes you make, so you can install any programs you like and have a persistent session. It’s also optimised for flash drive usage too - if your system has enough RAM, it can load the entire image into the RAM, making it very fast.
Hands down, one of the best tools I’ve used in a very long time:
https://github.com/PJ-Singh-001/Cubic
Download a Debian 12 standard live ISO (or with GNOME or any other iso) and you’re good to go. I’ve compiled custom kernels with it too. If you want persistence, then you use mkusb.
Yes, this does work, however there doesn’t seem to be a way to strip out the installer (since I won’t be installing from that ISO) or change desktop settings from a graphical environment… any way to do that?
- You can install Linux to external drives/USB sticks and boot from them.
- Some live systems offer persistence via a separate partition on the USB stick. You might want to look into those.
it’s not portable (a single iso file), and I don’t care about persistence that much tbh, to me it’s more important to be able to customize the system and add the things I need to it
