LiveCD Creation Documentation

Introduction

One of the goals of the MidnightBSD project is to create a Live CD that has an installer on it. This wouldn't necessarily be the only install option, but many people prefer this approach. It is very easy and you can test your hardware with the OS before in stalling.

The first step is to create a Live CD to try out MidnightBSD and for repair work. (A real fixit CD)

We need to decide what to add to the Live CD. List suggestions below.

0.3 Live CD

This live CD contains no packages: Live CD for i386 0.3-CURRENT Jan 2009

0.2 Live CD and DVD

The current test Live CD with no packages is here:Live CD for CURRENT May 2008 Live CD MD5

LiveDVD (working xorg, around 900MB). I attempted to put KDE on this one, but some packages were not installed properly. Live DVD with 0.2 CURRENT

Creating Live CDs

To create a live CD, you need to do the following:

  1. cd /usr/src; make buildworld
  2. make buildkernel
  3. cd nrelease
  4. make realquickrel

This will create a Live CD in /usr/release named mbsd.iso.

To customize your Live CD, you will need to take additional steps. Steps 1-3 are the same as above. You may add or edit conten ts in /usr/src/nrelease/root . These files will be copied using cpdup into the staging area for the live cd.

It's also possible to add packages.

  1. (complete steps 1-3 above) make buildiso
  2. mkdir /usr/release/root/usr/mports
  3. cd /usr/release/root/usr; mount_nullfs /usr/mports mports
  4. cd .. ; pkg_add -C . /usr/mports/Packages/i386/All/yourpackagename.tbz if you built your own local package on this system or pkg_add -C . -r kde3 to install kde for instance from the ftp server. Do additional pkg_add commands for other packages you are interested in.
  5. umount /usr/mports
  6. . cd /usr/src/nrelease; make buildiso2
  7. make mkiso

These directions are for 0.2-CURRENT.

For newer releases, starting with 0.4 you would need to use the new package manager. chroot into the directory and run mport install pkgname where pkgname is what you want to install.