Live USB – Make Customized Distro with Persistence Work

isolive-usbpersistence

We have a distro, Lubuntu 16.04, which we want to pack with a concrete SW, ToolboX (util/deb/toolbox_1.0-1.deb will install Geany, LaTeX packages, GNU Octave, etc., some extra 1.2GB, overall). Now, we have a functional installation and want to produce a persistent live version out of it, so that users (children, mostly without Linux knowledge) can easily burn a USB stick and start using it, keeping track of WIFI password and local files.

First thing I've tried is to produce an ISO with systemback, which works nicely after been copied (dd) to an USB stick. Problem is that systemback won't add persistence. Following these instructions, I've tried to add persistence to the stick, but it fails for some reason (it works well with an original Lubuntu ISO, but doesn't work for the ISO generated by systemback). Even if it would, this produces the stick itself, but the goal is to have an ISO that, when copied, provides a persistent version of the customized distro.

What are the alternatives out there to end up with this ISO?

Best Answer

The following approach will work:

Create a persistent live drive with mkusb according to the following links

help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb

help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb/persistent
Boot into the persistent live system
Install your software into the persistent live system
Make a cloned image of the whole drive.
If you give the image file the extension img (filename.img), or a compressed cloned image with gzip or xz compression, (filename.img.gz or filename.img.xz). Flash this image to new pendrives or memory cards.
- In Ubuntu you can use mkusb.
- In Windows you can use Win32 Disk imager.
This is similar to how the images at this link were created,

Compressed image file with a persistent live system

An alternative method to distribute your system would be to backup the casper-rw partition with your tweaks, and to restore it into 'standard' persistent live systems (made by mkusb but without tweaks).

Backup and restore of persistent overlay data

I downloaded the iso file made with Systemback. mkusb complained, that it was not an Ubuntu family or Debian iso file. But with the setting usb-pack-efi mkusb created a persistent live drive. So the solution was easier than I could imagine :-)

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Xubuntu live usb persistence – how to

If your settings and files are not saved when you reboot, you do not have persistence enabled.

You can either make a new Flash drive. This may be easiest as there are graphical tools to do this for you ("install" the iso to the flash drive and enable persistence).

See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent#Live_USB_creator_.28GUI-based.29

Alternately you can manually enable persistence. You can do this either by making a file or partition named "casper-rw". I think making a file would be easiest.

First, mount the flash drive at say /mnt

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

then make a file, change the count to increase the size:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/casper-rw bs=1M count=128

mkfs.ext4 /mnt/casper-rw

Then reboot, at the boot screen add the work "persistent" to the boot options.

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence#Using_a_Loopback_File for details.

Ubuntu – How do you use persistence in UEFI mode

The easiest way to create USB Live CD with persistence is to manually form the partitions using GParted.

This is what I've done:

Format your USB with GPT partition table (though, I believe MBR should work fine as well).
Create two partitions. First is for ISO files and it should be FAT32 (~1100MB for Ubuntu 14.04). Second is for persistence and it should be ext4 with label casper-rw.
Copy files from your ISO (including hidden) to USB FAT32 partition.
Edit boot/grub/grub.cfg and just add the word persistent (This is the reason why persistence doesn't work for you in UEFI mode.):

menuentry "Start Kubuntu" { set gfxpayload=keep linux /casper/vmlinuz.efipersistentfile=/cdrom/preseed/kubuntu.seed boot=casper maybe-ubiquity quiet splash -- initrd /casper/initrd.lz }

It might be a little slow when you first start it especially if you use USB2.0.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Xubuntu live usb persistence – how to

Ubuntu – How do you use persistence in UEFI mode

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