callmezatiel / buildiso

create a custom iso of debian

Debian Custom ISO Scripts and Tutorial

These are scripts that I made to help with the design and customization of a Debian ISO (Primarily DEMON LINUX). These scripts have recently been updated to accomodate newer distributions of Debian.

Dependencies

In your development OS, we need a few tools installed to build out our new Custom Debian. You can install these easily using the following command,

root@demon:~# apt install debootstrap squashfs-tools xorriso grub-pc-bin grub-efi-amd64-bin mtools live-build

Initialize the Project

The first part, is simply customizing the Debian ISO, in our case the Weakerthan LINUX flavor. The process is that same for starting from scratch, but you need to run the command:

root@demon-dev:~# initialize-build-process.sh buster

This will install all of the necessary tools to build the ISO and download the Debian LINUX system including packages and system configurations using the lb live-build Debian tool. Once this builds the ISO, we can then use the following steps in the "Updating an ISO" section to make our customizations before creating our own ISO.

Build in Customizations

we now have the directory ./chroot which contains our soon-to-be live ISO OS. We need to biuld a place within the ./chroot directory which will hold our "in chroot scripts" like so,

root@demon-dev:~# mkdir chroot/demon-dev
root@demon-dev:~# cp in-chroot-scripts/* chroot/demon-dev

Now, we can change root (chroot) into our new ./chroot directory and run the /demon-dev/in-chroot-mounts.sh script to prepare our environment for customizations. To begin, we simply need to run the following command to change root into the ./chroot directory and once done, run the /demon-dev/in-chroot-mounts.sh script.

root@demon-dev:~# ./chroot-start.sh
root@demon-dev:/# /demon-dev/in-chroot-mounts.sh # mounts all necessary OS mount points
root@demon-dev:/# dhclient -v  # in case network did not already happen

Next, we must set a locale.

root@demon-dev:/# export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
root@demon-dev:/# export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
root@demon-dev:/# export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
root@demon-dev:/# locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
root@demon-dev:/# dpkg-reconfigure locales
root@demon-dev:/# apt update # if this fails, you need to run the previous script, "in-chroot-mounts.sh"
root@demon-dev:/# dbus-uuidgen > /var/lib/dbus/machine-id
# if the locales failed previously, try again now that we have a new uid:
root@demon-dev:/# dpkg-reconfigure locales

Next, we must install a kernel and a couple other utilities:

root@demon-dev:/# apt install linux-image-amd64 live-boot systemd-sysv

We can now set our root password,

root@demon-dev:~# passwd root

We also must edit the (included) grub/grub.cfg file:

search --set=root --file /DEMON_CUSTOM

insmod all_video

set default="0"
set timeout=30

menuentry "Demon Linux (x64)" {
    linux /vmlinuz boot=live quiet nomodeset
    initrd /initrd
}

Finally, now that we are in the "chrooted" environment, we can make all of our updates.

X11 in Chroot

To start X, the machine requires a window manager, dbus connector, and X initialization applications. In the example below, I install XFCE4 - You can choose what ever you wish, just ensure that you install dbus-x11. After that, the chroot-start.sh and in-chroot-mounts.sh scripts will handle the rest of the process.

root@demon-dev:/# apt install --no-install-recommends xfce4 dbus-x11 xorg xinit

References

SquashFS-Tools (Debian Package): https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=squashfs-tools
Remastersys Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remastersys
Rsync: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
XorrISO: https://www.gnu.org/software/xorriso/
Full UNICODE chart for scripting: http://www.fileformat.info/info/charset/UTF-8/list.htm?start=8192
SYSLINUX: http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=Menu Will Haley: https://willhaley.com/blog/custom-debian-live-environment/