Linux CD Mastering
Written by Bill Johnson - January 23rd, 2005
Overview

As the popularity of Linux increases, many people are becoming more interested in building custom versions that better fit their needs. Linux users come from a broad base; some are developers, others are artists, while even others are just plain tinkerers. Linux may seem like just a tool for geeks, but did you know that linux can be a...
With all the possible variations out there one might start wondering where it can't be used. We believe that the answer is Linux can be used where any other computer operating system may be used, but sometimes it may need a bit of customization. This is the first in a series of articles on building your own custom Linux boot CD. We will take an existing bootable CD distribution, customize it and remaster it onto a new CD.

Now, you might be wondering...aren't there already a lot of articles about remastering Linux CD's out on the internet already? The answer that we'd give you is yes...and...no. Yes there are a lot of articles out there. However, when we had to build a custom bootable Linux CD for a client, we found that these articles had a few issues:
  • most of them were confusing
  • most of them were incomplete
  • some just plain didn't work
  • many of them missed what we'd call "Important Tips"
  • none of them accomplished our specific goals
  • all of them resulted in many wasted CD-Rs
  • each iteration took a significant amount of time
This article will address all of these points. In this article, We will present a complete, step by step process, including illustrations, on remastering a Linux CD. When we get finished, you will have your very own customized Linux CD. We will define clear goals and, along the way, we'll point out issues and opportunities. And finally, if you follow these steps very carefully, it is possible to build and test as many different versions of your customized CD as you like without burning a single one. We save the CD burning for the very last step, once we are 100% satisfied with our customized CD. In this way, we avoid burning a number of test CD's wasting valuable time, CD material, and most importantly, money. To our knowledge, none of the articles on the internet take this particular approach and we feel that it is the best in terms of reducing the cost and time required to do CD remastering.

At this point you're probably saying "Okay. Okay. I get your point, let's get started.", so without further delay we'll get into the good stuff. Click the link below to continue this article.

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