Remastering Knoppix

Quick notes on how I made a remastered Knoppix for David Wales. Closely based on an article by Robert Bernier at linuxdevcenter.com .

Get a Linux workstation, the most powerful you can get your hands on as this is CPU and memory intensive.

Install KNOPPIX on the hard drive (you'll need this for testing later). I did this in the root partition of my workstation which was /dev/hda6 . The method is to boot the original OS and mount the KNOPPIX CD. Copy the /KNOPPIX directory from the KNOPPIX CD into / . Copy the CD's autorun.*, cdrom.ico, and index.html files into / . From the CD's /boot/isolinux directory copy linux and minirt.gz into somewhere handy; I used /harddrive_boot . Then make lilo.conf boot the 'linux' kernel with minirt.gz as initrd, /dev/hda6 as root filesystem.

Reboot the workstation and select knoppix. Once it's booted up you need a disk on which to work as /dev/hda6 is mounted read-only. I made a directory /working and mounted /dev/hda7 on it (this is /home on the standard image). On /working I made three directories: KNOPPIX_original, KNOPPIX_remastered, and masterISO.

Copy the contents of /KNOPPIX into both KNOPPIX_ directories, preserving permissions and ownerships. Copy the following into masterISO:

• autorun.{bat,inf}
• cdrom.ico
• index.html
• boot/ (and contents)
• KNOPPIX/ (and contents except for the KNOPPIX file)

Copy /usr/bin/create_compressed_fs to /working. This probably isn't compulsory, but I found it useful to have it available when I was running the workstation's original SuSE as well as the Knoppix on the hard drive.

Chroot into KNOPPIX_remastered; this is the system you'll see when you boot off the CD. Make your changes. You will have to delete a lot of packages in order to be able to compress the system onto a CD.

Then exit the chroot, change to /working, and build the compressed KNOPPIX file in the masterISO directory from the KNOPPIX_remastered directory. If you are short of RAM you may need to make a swap file before doing this, but I had 1Gb and 1Gb of swap already.

mkisofs -R -U -V "Custom Knoppix" -publisher "your name here" -hide-rr-moved \
-cache-inodes -pad ./KNOPPIX_remastered | nice -5 ./create_compressed_fs - \
65536 > masterISO/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX

Then boot up your original OS and copy the new compressed file over your old /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX . Boot the new distro to test.