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How could I create a custom linux distro/iso without using special tools like respin and archiso? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by wtry@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[-] throwawayish@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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 :

  1. 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?
  2. Are we still talking about Debian with all your GNOME tweaks?
  3. Is Debian a hard requirement? Or would you be open to say something like Fedora?
  4. Is Live USB a hard requirement?
  5. 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.

[-] DryTomatoes4@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.)

[-] throwawayish@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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!

[-] DryTomatoes4@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] throwawayish@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The official manual page for xorriso is probably the best place to start. Unfortunately it mostly glosses over how it's compatible with mkisofs and doesn't further delve too much into what mkisofs does and thus how to engage with the -b flag. Fortunately, that information can be found on the related manual page for xorrisofs.

Please feel free to notify me if I can be of further help :blush: !

[-] DryTomatoes4@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks. I see the word boot is referenced 200 times on the related manual page. So I suspect a thorough read through of that page will help me.

[-] throwawayish@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah lol 🤣 . Consider reporting back after testing your findings. Thanks in advance!

[-] DryTomatoes4@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Edit: For anyone reading this in the future ECMA-119 is freely distributable and seems to conform to ISO 9660. ECMA also have versions of some of the specs referenced by ISO 9660. (ECMA-6, ECMA-35, ECMA-43)

Will do. I was gonna start by reading ISO 9660 and I found out it costs 200 dollars from standards.iso.org. Which is a shame because there's a bunch of other ISO standards referenced in 9660 which would cost even more money to read. I always heard people reference these standards but I had no idea they were so inaccessible to regular users. But I think I found some kind of annotated copy of the spec to read,

this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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