LiveCD or No LiveCD?

[Sebastian Faulborn]

Maybe the way the LiveCD was produced was too complicated. It was seen 
as a separate project which had its own approaches.

There is another way which I use with Secure-SLinux:

I have a script which automatically creates a bootable cd image from any 
linux distribution current installed.

Basically you can compile LFS/BLFS with jalfs (installing selected 
packages), run the script and you are done. No need to modify the script 
for a LFS/BLFS version update!

The script works as follows:
- creates a copy of the current linux installation in a separate directory
- modifies a few startscripts
- compresses that directory
- creates an initrd

the initrd will detect the cd, create a ram-disk which will become the 
new root-partition and another ram-disk which contains a compressed 
filesystem which contains the most important commands. Because of this 
2nd compressed ramdisk, the livecd is nearly as fast as a distro on a 
harddrive and you can eject the cd while being able to continue to work 
with the live-distro! This is convenient when you need to insert another 
cd to copy data (eg. source files).

During the boot process it will ask you which keyboard to use. It boots 
with framebuffer support - you can choose the resolution in the boot 
menu of the cd. So there is no need to configure XOrg in any way at all 
(mouse is autodetected by the kernel).

I would recommend to put the following packages on the livecd:
- all of LFS
BLFS:
- startup scripts, filesystems, dhcp, etc.
- Xorg, XFCE, firefox, terminal, editor, etc.

The script has worked nicely for the last few years.

What do you think?

After all - we do not want another project which installs the packages 
on the cd different from the way it is done in the book - or do we? The 
livecd should demonstrate that the book works as it is.


Sebastian Faulborn
IT - Consultant, M.Sc. Cambridge UK

Homepage: http://www.secure-slinux.org <http://www.secure-slinux.org>