SliTaz Handbook (en) Generate a LiveCD to taste

Generate a LiveCD to taste

Create your own LiveCD quickly and easily with Tazlito.

• To begin.
• A LiveCD in 2 commands.
• Get a taste.
• Generate the distribution.
• Create a flavor.
• Additional files.
• Packages used.
• Configuration file.

To begin

Creating your own LiveCD version of SliTaz with Tazlito takes very little time and you can choose precisely the software packages that you want to find on the system. The support of flavors permits you to generate a customized LiveCD amended by a list of packages or flavors created by the SliTaz community. Tazlito is a command line tool that is not too demanding, you can have your own ISO image in two commands or burned in one.
The generation of the LiveCD requires a minimum of 256 MB RAM and system compression with LZMA may take some time. It's possible to create a distribution from the LiveCD or from an installed system. In LiveCD mode, it's advisable to use persistent media or a USB drive to store generated files and save space in RAM.
Tazlito is used by developers to generate the official LiveCD. The only prerequisite is to have Tazlito installed, this is installed by default on SliTaz, but you can generate from another LiveCD distribution if they have the necessary packages on hand or they can be downloaded.

Install Tazlito on another distribution

Tazlito does not generate dependencies for the LiveCD, but it depends on Cdrkit to burn the image and Tazpkg to regenerate SliTaz packages you want installed. To retrieve and install Tazlito, follow the instructions in the README file in the sources of Tazlito.

A LiveCD in 2 commands

• Get a flavor : tazlito get-flavor core
• Optional : Amend the list of packages or add additional files.
• Generate the distribution : tazlito gen-distro

Once finished, you will find the LiveCD ISO image in the /home/slitaz/distro.
For simple instructions click here .

Get a taste

A flavor is a .flavor file containing all the necessary information for the creation of the CD. The flavor provides the list of packages (distro-packages.list) and additional files for the chosen flavor. A list of flavors can be downloaded and updated with Tazlito:

# tazlito list-flavors
 Or :
 # tazlito list-flavors --recharge

A list of flavors will automatically be displayed, giving the size of the LiveCD and a brief description. For the remainder, the get-flavor command will download the flavor file, automatically extract the package list and description in the current directory and put additional files in the /home/slitaz/distro/addfiles directory. To store flavors, we suggest that you use a specific directory such as /home/slitaz/flavors, you can create this yourself and proceed inside:

# mkdir -p /home/slitaz/flavors
 # cd /home/slitaz/flavors

To download and/or extract the files in a particular flavor:

# tazlito get-flavor particular-flavor

The description of the flavor can be displayed with the show-flavor command. Once the chosen flavor is downloaded you can start to generate the distribution.

Generate the distribution

For your first ISO, we advise you to test without modifying the list, then you can start to delete or add packages at will. But beware, the base system packages are essential. The gen-distro command generates an ISO image with all the packages on the list, it must be run as root and be in the same directory as the list and the configuration file. To generate a LiveCD:

# tazlito gen-distro

Voilà, your first LiveCD ISO image is generated in /home/slitaz/distro, but without an account for the user hacker.

The user hacker

If you want to have a hacker user account, we must add one and then recreate the compressed root filesystem:

# tazlito addhacker
 # tazlito gen-initiso

Clean and regenerate distro

To continue to go further, you can simply add one or two packages to the list, clean the distro and regenerate the root filesystem with a new ISO image:

# tazlito clean-distro
 # tazlito gen-distro

Tazlito also offers several possibilities, such as burning the ISO, copying additional files into the system or directly on to the cdrom. The Tazlito Manual provides more information.

Create a flavor

Tazlito allows you to easily create your own flavor from the results of generating the distribution (gen-distro). The file will contain all the flavor's additional files, a description and a list of packages which can be reused later and updated according to the versions of packages. To generate your own flavor responding to one or two questions:

# tazlito gen-flavor new-flavor

Once your flavor is fully functioning and well tested, you can send it to slitaz.org to make it available to all and sundry, listed via list-flavor and usable via get-flavor. To send a flavor you have several means, announce through the mailing list, save the file online and report on the forum or send by mail to a contributor of the project.

Additional files

The files containing flavors usually have additional files copied directly into the filesystem or the root of the cdrom. The path to the files used is specified in the configuration file tazlito.conf - by default, the files are located in /home/slitaz/distro/addfiles. The additional files the core flavor provides are for example, the window manager JWM and some wallpapers. It is easy enough to modify, add or delete files in the root filesystem (rootfs) or the root of the CD (rootcd) and regenerate the distribution. To clean and regenerate the distribution:

# tazlito clean-distro
 # tazlito gen-distro

Packages used

To create your distro you need SliTaz packages. Tazlito and Tazpkg allow us to recreate packages from a SliTaz system in operation or to download packages directly depending on the flavor chosen. By default, SliTaz packages are located in the directory /home/slitaz/packages, but you can change this via the Tazlito configuration file (tazlito.conf).
If you want to retrieve packages manually, you can use FTP software such as gFTP (installed by default on SliTaz) or the command line and wget to download official packages. The direct URL to package versions: ftp://download.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/packages/
You can also use your own packages by putting them in the packages directory. If you are looking for documentation about the creation of SliTaz packages, you can refer to the Cookbook.

Configuration file

By default, Tazlito uses the system configuration file /etc/tazlito/tazlito.conf or the tazlito.conf located in the current directory. This means that you can use the default file or a configuration file specific to the distro you want to create. This file can change the name of the ISO image, the name of the maintainer and the paths to the working directories. To create and configure your own configuration file, you just need to run Tazlito with the configure command from the working directory of the distro. Assuming you have the tree of the distro in /home/slitaz/distro and you're located within:

$ tazlito configure

Once you've answered the questions, you can either create the ISO image, rebuild the root filesystem and ISO, or generate a new distro with the list of packages.

source : http://www.slitaz.org/en/doc/handbook/gen-livecd.html