Create ISO image of a Linux system

[Fulgurance]

Hi everyone, I have a question.

I am coding now from over one year a package manager, and I would like to make a live iso of the generated system .

I don't have any idea how to do that.

How normally Gentoo team do to generate a live cd of a Gentoo system ?
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My actual project: https://github.com/Fulgurance/ISM

Ingenius Software Manager is a tool to build and manage a Linux system from scratch.
It will able to manage a linux installation just with a given path to the futur root path

[szatox]

In a nutshell, you need 3 things:

- root file system - this is typically a squashfs. Sqfs is compressed and read-only. Hint: mksquashfs
- in-ram buffer for runtime changes - overlayfs can merge mounted squashfs image with a tmpfs into a writable rootfs. This is how gentoo's liveCD is made, and it appears to be using genkernel's initramfs, so you don't even need to roll your own.
- a way to boot it. Typically done by having a copy of kernel and initramfs outside of squashfs. You can use GRUB now, though back in the days isolinux (provided by syslinux package) was the one and only way to go.

mkisofs will let you put all the pieces together into a bootable iso image. It can create a hybrid image too, one that will boot from either CD or USB. For usb only, you can also manually create a partition table, partition for data and install bootloader just like you would with any other disk.


Use your gentoo experience to fill in the gaps. There are big gaps in what I wrote, but it should be enough to get you started, and you can always ask more questions later.

[duane]