[CentOS-devel] CentOS 5 Live CD

Sun Jul 29 02:57:22 UTC 2007
Patrice Guay <patrice.guay at nanotechnologies.qc.ca>

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-livecd-desktop.ks

--
Patrice Guay