Re: HOWTO create a localized live CD



Under follows a HOWTO for the Live CD provided by Marcus Bauer. I mailed
him with some questions which you can find at the bottom but he hasn't
replied so I thought I'd send it here in a "Feel Lucky?" manner :-)

man, 23,.05.2005 kl. 14.05 +0200, skrev Marcus Bauer:
Hi,

below is a first draft about how to create a live CD. Check it out and
give me your feedback. It would be great if we could work on a common
plattform, i.e. not everybody having his personal script but collecting
all improvements. Same thing applies for your local enhancements: please
let me know what you added/changed so we can integrate that into the
process. 

Thanks for your support!



HOWTO create a localized live CD
================================

Prerequisites
-------------

Install the following packages (here the debian names):
cloop-utils rsync mkisofs msttcorefonts syslinux

Make sure you have enough memory, you need 700MB free; a swapfile is
easily added:
  dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=700k
  mkswap -c swapfile
  swapon swapfile

Download: http://project77.info/gnomelive/livecd.tgz (900KB)
and unpack it. This will create under livecd/ the necessary directories
and contains stuff for localization and branding.

Next you need to download the live CD iso from ubuntu:
http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/5.04/ubuntu-5.04-live-i386.iso
(if you are short of bandwidth and just want to help localization you
can skip this)

Change to livecd/locales and create a directory with the name of your
locale (i.e. pt_BR or no_NO) and copy everything from en_US into it.

Translations
------------
You need to translate all the text files, at least isolinux.txt and
f1.txt; don't worry that doesn't take more than 10 minutes.

Changing images
---------------
boot-splash:
* open gnome-boot-splash-it.xcf in gimp
  the text is in separate layers which makes changes easy
  font is trebuchet bold
* make your changes and save in .xcf to be able to reuse it
* merge visible layers (it is important to merge before indexing)
* image->mode->indexed->16 colors, dithering: none
* save as .ppm, raw mode
* now run on the command line:
  ppmtolss16 < gnome-boot-splash-XY.ppm > splash.rle
  XY=your language, i.e. pt, no etc.

gnome-backgound:
* open gnome-background-XY.xcf in gimp
* make your changes an save as .jpg

To add additional software, add them the .deb packages to your
directory. manpages-XY and doc-linux-XY may be a good starting point.

You may download a copy of the latest firefox for windows and save it to
the winprogs directory. Thus after a demonstration of the gnome liveCD
you can install a first open source program on that computer you ran the
liveCD on (which most likly is running windows...)

FINISHED. You are done!

Now change back to livecd/ and run: ./make_livecd.sh

Depending on the speed of your Computer and network connection it takes
about an hour to create the new .iso.


===============================================================

Some more words:

In case of problems (not unlikely) and/or questions just mail me. I'm
currently quite familiar with that stuff and may save you a lot of
time. 

The script still needs more extensions, a lot of stuff is still
hardwired which is a bad thing(tm). Your experience is needed to enhance
the script to make it possible to create them all on the fly for gnome
2.12. 

Have fun!
Marcus


Hello, I requested[1] some info on how to create a localised Live CD
some time back. I didn't notice your reply/HOWTO until yesterday though.
The HOWTO was very explaining and I've successfully created the iso but
it still got some issues;

* I've translated the f1.txt and so on files, but the Norwegian
characters doesn't show correctly when you boot. Is it even possible to
make them show correctly?

* The autorun feature didn't work on with windows. Do you have any clue
if this is my fault or? The autorun.ini file etc was in place.

* I created the iso using ./the-make-script nb nb-NO iirc. And choose
nb-NO in the locale dialog accordingly afterwards. When I opened firefox
it obviously tried to open a localised version of the start page but
nb-NO isn't supported (probably only "no" or "nb" is). Do you have any
idea if this is a key that resides somewhere I can change it before
making the iso? It looks slightly unprofessional that the start page has
an error message.

* Is it fairly trivial to put my own things in /Desktop so that if we
translated luis' documents we could put them there?

Btw, has there been any progress in the "Start here" document for the
live CDs" that you know of? I would love to help out although for the
time  being I don't know how to use docbook. 

Hope this isn't too much of a hassle for you!

Cheers,
Terance


[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2005-May/msg00192.html




[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]