Would you be fine with some tooling that enables one to make their own custom iso from an existing distro? This path still allows for a substantial amount of freedom, though it’s not a blank slate by any stretch of the imagination. But it makes up for it with how relatively easy and painless it can be.
Or would you instead like to get into the nitty-gritty of things and want all the freedom you’d want? This increased freedom does come with a substantial cost in convenience and labour.
Pick your poison :P . I’ll be waiting ;) .
So taking your other comment into consideration as well, I suppose the following would be the easiest good setup:
- Install Debian Stable using the image for a minimal network install onto a secondary device or onto a partition of your main device (multi-boot). Make sure to only include the stuff you think you’d need.
- Install all of your favorite tools within that Debian Stable installation.
- Use the excellent penguins-eggs package to make a live image out of it.
- Install the live image onto your favorite USB with whichever tool you like; personally I enjoy using ventoy.
- Profit :P .
If my proposed solution doesn’t quite fit your needs, then please feel free to correct me!
This sounds like a perfectly workable solution!
I assume getting a persistent environment in a USB recovery stick is a bigger task? I’m imagining that, with your method, I would need to repeat this process any time I wanted to update the image or load specific new kernel modules/drivers?
Going to try the penguins-eggs method you posted. I would love to be able to turn a virtual box environment into an installable medium to make my own version of debian with all my gnome tweaks.
I would also love a solution that doesn’t require booting into the OS first. So that I can take a root dir and turn it into a bootable iso. I tried a bunch of old tutorials for making a boot.iso and linking it into mkisofs with -b but it never worked.
I am willing to learn/use any free tooling. Not picky at all.
Going to try the penguins-eggs method you posted. I would love to be able to turn a virtual box environment into an installable medium to make my own version of debian with all my gnome tweaks.
Good choice! The “penguins-eggs method” should fit the bill ;) !
I would also love a solution that doesn’t require booting into the OS first. So that I can take a root dir and turn it into a bootable iso.
Few questions :P :
- If I understood you correctly, you mean that all of the files that will make up the bootable iso are contained -presumably under FHS- within a root dir of another distro? Or did you mean it as a partition? Or did you mean any tool that can build your iso from within another system based on (declarative) instructions?
- Are we still talking about Debian with all your GNOME tweaks?
- Is Debian a hard requirement? Or would you be open to say something like Fedora?
- Is Live USB a hard requirement?
- Might seem random, but what’s your stance on declarative distros?
I tried a bunch of old tutorials for making a boot.iso and linking it into mkisofs with -b but it never worked.
Small nitpick; I generally recommend using xorriso over mkisofs, the latter is only packaged in most distros as part of xorriso anyways*. While genisoimage does ‘provide’ mksisofs as well, genisoimage is unmaintained and should therefore not be used.
So eggs is great for Debian with my Gnome stuff.
As for xorriso I have a LFS dir that very much resembles a Linux root dir (without a DE or any distro specific software) and I can chroot into it mounting /dev, /sys, /run, /proc from my host system.
I would like to compress that LFS dir into an iso combined with a boot loader.
That LFS dir is on a separate partition and does have a boot loader installed on that partition’s hard drive. But I’d rather boot it in a virtual machine and I didn’t want to give the vm raw hard drive access.
I hope that helps but I’m happy to answer more questions.
Booting into a live CD isn’t a hard requirement because I can probably just use eggs after I get it to boot in a vm.
Edit: also thanks for the insight about xorriso I had real trouble finding much info about the differences between the three.
Edit 2: I’m going to run LFS on the exact same hardware it compiled on so I can probably use grub installed on my host system.
That said I did try using grub-mkimage on my host system and when passing that iso into mkisofs -b I still couldn’t get a boot. (No bootable medium found.)
