Create your own Mandrake LiveCD with mklivecd!
 

This little demon was surfin' the web for Mandrake related goodies and happened to discover:

-----> mklivecd <-----

Project Page, CVS Download Page, Screenshots, Mailing Lists (https) , Mailing Lists (http), (and the original page I found which has detailed info on cvs (but is it up to date? may or may not be more up to date than the cvs download page linked to above, I didn't check)

So.... this looks very interesting.. I haven't downloaded any of the files or tried this mklivecd program yet.. but it does look like something that would be fun to whip up my own livecd custom distros for friends and family to introduce them to Linux. I tried doing a "urpmi mklivecd" and sure enough it tried to download an old version of mklivecd, so I'm going to try the cvs version instead since there's rpms for it available. I hope this works with Mandrake 10 Official and kernel 2.6!

What say you, fellow Mandrake users? :) Anyone interested in this? Anyone use this to make their own LiveCD?

Let us know! :)

Edit: Oh, and here's a quote from their about page:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
"i n t r o
The LiveCD project is dedicated to providing you with tools to create your own LiveCD from a currently installed Linux distribution. It can be used to create your own distribution, specialised CD or to put together a demo disk to show off the power of our favourite OS.

f e a t u r e s
The project features automatic hardware detection and setup and utilises compression technology to build a LiveCD from a partition much larger to typically fit on a CD. (Up to 2GB for a normal 650MB CD.) When booting from this LiveCD, the data is transparently decompressed as needed.

Currently only Mandrake Linux 9.2+ is supported as a host for creation of the LiveCD, i.e. we are only able to create LivceCD's from a MDK install."
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So it sounds like the program/scripts/whatever they use uses the compression scheme similar to Knoppix's liveCD? If so, that sounds AWESOME! I could really put together a cool Mandrake liveCD!

Edit #2: Looks like the author of this mklivecd program has another page for a LiveCD he made (using the program mklivecd I assume): MiniCD. In his forums on the MiniCD site he posts an answer to the question:

===> "I was wondering what kind of compression are you getting when mastering the CDs?"

===>"See for yourself:

[jaco@localhost minicd]$ ls -al mdkimg.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 188300602 Mar 16 13:31 mdkimg.clp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 435879936 Mar 16 13:24 mdkimg.iso

That is with a "gzip -9" type compression. (Basically the same as used in Knoppix.) What I am also working on (yes, I have way, way, way too many side-projects) is a bzip2-type compression modules. Instead of cloop I guess the kernel module will be called bzloop. I would love to see what that does and what the performance (decompression) penalty would be - if any.

Greetings,
Jaco"
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Hmmm... Well now.... sounds fun. :) Of course that quote is dated March of 2003 but the latest cvs rpm's are dated Nov 2003 or so and the cvs src page has files which are as recent as a few weeks ago... so the above quote is probably way out of date.. Just wanted to post this info for discussion. :)

Edit #3:Haven't tried cvs yet for this but from this post on the mailing list it appears there's a newer version of mklivecd as recent as June, maybe newer.

Disclaimer: I am not the author of mklivecd or minicd or any of the pages linked to above. Quotes are listed here as they appear at the source(s) : therefore all spelling errors in each belong to the author(s) of said quotes.

So has anyone tried making their own LiveCD with this yet?

Was this thread of interest to anyone? :-)

I actually plan to try in the near future. This should help with a project I am working on for a museum. They have asked me to design a simple kiosk machine.

I thought it would be great to have this load from a cd, not the hard drive.

If anyone else has tried. Please post some issues that you may have ran into...


Thanks

I think it'd be cool to have a live cd with firefox and thunderbird.
Alvin

This looks like an excellent idea - thanks for pointing it out to us. I am going to make this a "sticky thread" - I think it is that useful. For the moment, I will leave it in Mandrake as only Mandrake works with it - if it gets extended to other distros, let me know and I'll move it into the main Distro forum.

You're welcome. :)

Quote:

I am going to make this a "sticky thread" - I think it is that useful.

Great, thanks XavierP! :)

What about Mandrake 10? Can it be a host for making liveCds?

It is sure interesting to make a Mandrake (my own) LiveCD distro.
I have thought about it to make my own LiveCD distro based on Knoppix (which is a great product).
But to have it based on Mandrake would be even better.

I liked the urpmi feature very much, so this would be a great thing.

You might even want to create a livecd off the cooker lists... it changes much... but.... who knows... try the newest cooker version 9.99.x ;-)

I haven't tried it but I've read about other people doing it in the mailing list, which you can read on-line. Perhaps those interested in using this with Mandrake 10 should participate on their mailing list (and maybe let them know that they can discuss it here as well?) :) :) :)

Mandrake 10
 

"SAM" (see www.distrowatch.org) is a MiniCD Mandrake 10 "LiveCD".

It fits on a 200 (186 meg in actual size for SAM) meg MiniCD.

I've also put it onto a 512meg USB KEY and have had no problems booting it from there.

The latter has the added advantage of hosting a RW filesystem.

Nice, Mandrake Linux (with KDE!) on a keyring bootable on almost all USB 2.0 computers and most USB 1.1 machines.

I am trying to make live cd based on slackware 10. Just server programs, nothing else. But it didn't work.

Re: Mandrake 10
 

It really is a nice mini distro, it is fast and has XFCE as the default desktop.

MandrakeClub members can download the Mandrakelinux-Move ISO which is used to create a "live" CD.

However, I did that yesterday, and failed to be impressed by the very slo-o-w
loading, KDE-equipped result.

Maybe I just don't understand well enough how to use such a live CD.

I thought maybe I could load it on a friend's laptop to show him how Mandrake Linux would work on his machine, but after trying it myself I think I'd be embarrassed to.

Yeah, unfortunately that is the problem with LiveCD distros, that they are quit dependant upon the speed of the drive for performance.

Some of the Mini distros load the greater part of the entire distro into RAM, and these run pretty fast as a result, abeit you have far less RAM available for applications.

LiveCD's are great to use in a pinch, but IMHO are not viable for prolonged use.

This looks like a great idea - I might be tempted to give it a try..

Jonr - I also had a look at Mandrake Move, and was rather unimpressed with performance.. it took ages to boot. Nowhere near as good as, say, Knoppix.. I was rather disappointed, given that I've had a generally positive experience of Mandy 10...