CentOS LiveCD

Posted by Patrice Guay in CentOS LiveCD, Portfolio      4 comments

Feb
5

Presentation

A LiveCD is a complete, bootable and operational operating system on a distributable medium. The distribution medium can be various storage media like a CD, a DVD or a USB key. The LiveCD name is a relic of the time when CD was the only available media. LiveCD have the ability to run a complete operating system without the need for a permanent storage like a hard disk drive. Therefore, a LiveCD can be used to test hardware compatibility, recover data or test an operating system without interfering with the already installed operating system.

CentOS LiveCD

The CentOS LiveCD, based on CentOS 5, is available on both i386 and x86_64 architectures from the official mirror page. The tools from the Fedora livecd-tools project were used to create the latest CentOS LiveCD image.

This toolset offers numerous advantages:

• all directories are writable
• a simpler LiveCD creation process
• easily transfer the LiveCD image to a USB drive

Development

The CentOS LiveCD project is where the development of the CentOS LiveCD takes place. Various topics are covered:

• Getting the LiveCD creation toolset
• Creating a LiveCD image
• Transfering a LiveCD image to a Flash drive
• Using the persistence feature to preserve modifications
• Boot a LiveCD image through PXE
• Customizing your own LiveCD

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4 Comments to “CentOS LiveCD”

• Friday March 5th, 2010 at 08:11 PM
  CentOS LiveCD customization « Patrice Guay, eng. says:

  If you need help to customize your own CentOS-based LiveCD, I can provide you with expert consulting services.
• Monday May 10th, 2010 at 07:41 AM
  Alex B. says:

  Hiya there,

  Your site for the LiveCD project generating an error: https://projects.centos.org/trac/livecd/

  Traceback (most recent call last):
  […]
  ExtractionError: Can’t extract file(s) to egg cache

  The following error occurred while trying to extract file(s) to the Python egg
  cache:

  [Errno 13] Permission denied: ‘/.python-eggs’

  The Python egg cache directory is currently set to:

  /.python-eggs

  Perhaps your account does not have write access to this directory? You can
  change the cache directory by setting the PYTHON_EGG_CACHE environment
  variable to point to an accessible directory.
• Monday May 10th, 2010 at 09:40 AM
  Patrice Guay says:

  Thanks for pointing this out. The issue has been fixed.
• Tuesday August 30th, 2011 at 08:14 AM
  sadotmd says:

  As alternative, I would recommend to check this tutorial about creating CentOS liveCDs:
  http://www.sysadmin.md/whitepapers/Create_and_test_CentOS_LiveCD_ISOs_on_remote_server.pdf