Remastering script for Ubuntu

Backup or Dist?

Next, you need to enter your root password; you are also prompted to close all other windows and umount network shares before continuing (Figure 2). Then, a somewhat outdated-looking graphical user interface opens at the top, with three tabs named Actions , Settings , and Output . The first tab lists four options for using Pinguy Builder at the top. Backup is used to build a precise image of the system with all the settings and output. The Dist option does the same, but it excludes your personal data and user-scoped settings (Figure 3).

Figure 2: Close other windows before running the script.

Figure 3: Dist mode creates an image without any personal data.

The other two options – Distcdfs and Distiso – divide the process into two parts, which allows for further editing. The first part creates a filesystem, to which you can add more data or packages, and the second part builds the image based on it. The fifth button removes temporary files before building. You can add customized themes for the boot manager in the Live CD, the installed system, and the Plymouth boot screen in the lower part of the first tab.

A Question of Settings

In the second tab, you can change the predefined working directory, if necessary, and define a label and name for the final product. The working directory must reside in a Linux filesystem on the installed system. You can also change the options for SquashFS [8], if necessary, and you can exclude files or folders from the ISO. Next, you can choose one of the options to launch the operation. The two first options take around 30 minutes on state-of-the-art hardware, with the lion's share consumed by SquashFS assembling the ISO (Figure 4).

Figure 4: SquashFS takes about half an hour.

We reduced the size of the existing installation for the test by removing around 400MB of packages. The resulting image is stored in /home/PinguyBuilder/PinguyBuilder (Figure 5); you can now burn it to a CD or put it on a memory stick. The developer recommends testing in VirtualBox before further use. The maximum possible size of the ISO is 4GB, limited by the ISO9660 standard.