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.)
Thanks for answering! Now I’ve got a better picture of what you’re trying to achieve. However, unfortunately, I’ve yet to dabble into LFS. So I’m afraid that I might not be that helpful 😭. Wish you the best of luck though!
Alright thanks. Well if you know of any good resources for xorriso particularly with the -b (boot) flag I’d like to read them.
Google has been mostly serving me 15 year old SO posts that aren’t relevant to modern Linux anymore.
