I am currently building a Live CD for CentOS 5. I am using the livecd-creator script from the livecd-tools project [1].
Here is my setup: - A workstation with CentOS 5 i386 - dosfstools 2.11-8 [2] - livecd-tools 009-11 [2] - pykickstart 1.0-1 [2]
To create a live CD, you need a kickstart configuration file[3].
You also need to increase the maximum number of open files: # ulimit -n 65535
Then, you can start the creation process (~30 minutes): # livecd-creator --config=centos-livecd-desktop.ks
The resulting iso image (644MB) can be transfered to an USB key... # livecd-iso-to-disk <isopath> <usbstick device>
... or simply burned to a CD or DVD.
The live CD has a writable /usr directory. However, it can not be used to install CentOS 5 on your system. A new anaconda package will be required to achieve this functionality.
[1] http://git.fedoraproject.org/?p=hosted/livecd [2] These packages are available at http://www.nanotechnologies.qc.ca/propos/linux/centos-live/i386/live [3] http://www.nanotechnologies.qc.ca/propos/linux/centos-live/i386/live/centos-...
-- Patrice Guay