Just a thought, but live systems are usually just a packed fs like squashfs in an iso with syslinux. Loop mount your image, copy the files out, start a chroot to use a package manager if you want, pack up the modified system back into squashfs, copy to the iso, run syslinux if you need to change the config, aaand your image is now modified 😹 a lot easier said than done, but maybe an interesting excursion.
We need a little more info than that.
Like, what OS? What other tools? Why does it need to be custom, can't you just install the tools on the installed system? Why do you need a live session/ISO, if you plan on having it installed on persistant storage anyway?
I'm not particular about the distro, I just want something stable so there I don't have to re-make it, that supports Wayland. As for why I want it as an iso, portability, I wanna be able to take it and flash it at will. As for the tools, partitioning tools vscode and dotnet is all I need
NixOS might be a particularly elegant solution to make that image reproducible and you could even do version control to get it just right.
I'd love to use NixOS, but it's way too complicated for me, and the documentation sucks...
I hear ya. I recommend forking a setup and modding it slowly in a VM. That way, you can dial it in progressively.
I understand that it’s a sea change and documentation isn’t great but I’d posit that there are plenty of great setups on GitHub that will get you 99% of the way toward a working config. Whatever you decide, I hope you realize I’m not trying to pressure you. I just really love it once I got used to it’s way of working, coming from a more standard FHS Kubuntu config where I had to have weird scripts to mount discs on fstab on boot to do pretty standard stuff.
I have a VM part of my config (before I started putting anything that would even remotely expose good vectors of attack at all in an encrypted secure folder) that would work great and has all the fancy stuff like flakes, content-addressed derivations, and home-manager enabled by default.
Once a config works in NixOS, it is nearly impossible to break. That’s the thing I like about NixOS: once I get something working, it’s pretty much guaranteed to stay working and is 100% guaranteed to stay working if you never update the flake. I like to make progress and have that progress stick with me even when I refactor everything around it..and that certainly is the power of Nix/NixOS.
ok, but is there a way to turn the system I get out of configuring nix into a live iso easily?
Absolutely. I think there are even some tutorials out there.
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Creating_a_NixOS_live_CD
https://nix.dev/tutorials/nixos/building-bootable-iso-image
Maybe you could work in some code from: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence to really keep it wiping almost everything on reboot.
Once you arrive at something, please share it to help the mindshare.
Feel free to look at my config at https://github.com/harryprayiv/nix-config (I added a branch for liveISO that I worked on for a bit).
If you git clone then switch to that branch, you could use the command ./switch_TUI to access the little TUI I made just now to walk you through the evaluation of your iso config under option 2 in the TUI to evaluate (kind of my way to evaluate and dry run until nix stops giving warnings) home manager config and option 15 for the evaluation of the system part of the config (all of the relevant files for this live inside of /system/machine/liveIso and I just connected them in my top-level flake). You’d just have to change filesystem mounts and other hardware related stuff…maybe comment things out until it asks for them then start to open things up again. That’s the beauty of laziness, IMO.
This seems like a worthy endeavor so I worked on it a bit.
Edit: heavily edited to include stuff that I made for you.
Thanks! I'll take a better look at it and nixos (again) when I have time, I like how honest you are about text editors lol. Looks incredibly complicated at a 1st glance
the liveIso branch is SIGNIFICANTLY pared down for your consumption though admittedly I was unable to get the live iso part working.
I got a working, good, lightweight, kickass xmonad home-manager config into the system/machine/liveISO folder just for you.
Just use Puppy Linux. Puppy creates a r/w overlay file which can be updated with any changes you make, so you can install any programs you like and have a persistent session. It's also optimised for flash drive usage too - if your system has enough RAM, it can load the entire image into the RAM, making it very fast.
Hands down, one of the best tools I've used in a very long time:
https://github.com/PJ-Singh-001/Cubic
Download a Debian 12 standard live ISO (or with GNOME or any other iso) and you're good to go. I've compiled custom kernels with it too. If you want persistence, then you use mkusb.
Yes, this does work, however there doesn't seem to be a way to strip out the installer (since I won't be installing from that ISO) or change desktop settings from a graphical environment... any way to do that?
Use the live version (thd try without installing option). You can also remove the installer code if you really want to - I think Ubuntu uses ubiquity/subiquity.
it's not portable (a single iso file), and I don't care about persistence that much tbh, to me it's more important to be able to customize the system and add the things I need to it
Okay, so your main goal really is your own Linux live ISO? Unfortunately I don't really have experience with that.
Are you looking for something like Fedora CoreOS maybe? Or NixOS?
No, not really, just want stable with gnome on Wayland...
I think you can create a custom iso like that with CoreOS, not something I'm super familiar with though. You can have a look at this:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/live-booting/
If I understand it correctly: you just want something you can flash or plug into a random PC, like when you switch companies or rebuild your PC often, and then work from this setup for developing. Is that right?
There are following options I have in my mind right now:
Install a "normal" Distro of your choice (e.g. Fedora Workstation or Silverblue) onto a external hard drive, or (maybe?) better, an USB-NVME. Now, you can just use your setup on every PC by just booting from the hard drive. If you are a developer, you probably use containers anyway, so I would recommend an immutable distro like VanillaOS or Silverblue. They are way harder to break and will make you more productive.
Use NixOS or something therelike. You just write your system-config as a nix-file and then you can overwrite any Nix installation. There's also Fedora uBlue, where you can make something similar, but that image is more cloud based, while Nix is "simpler".
Make your own "distro" by using an iso-maker program. There are a few around, but I don't have any in my mind right now.
But you should still explain your intentions better, they are hard to grasp for me.
Ok, so pretty much, I want a portable, minimal desktop setup with some partitioning tools and some development tools in an iso format, so I can at any point in time simple take it, chuck it into ventoy or flash it with persistent storage and be ready to go.
And those "iso-maker" programs are more specifically what I'm asking for, either that or if there is a way to make a customized image of a pre-existing distro
I've used and even daily driven Linux off an external drive before, that's not what I'm asking about, I'm specifically asking about a way to make a customized live iso image...
It's not clear... Do you want a portable USB drive ? If that's the case it's easily doable with Arch or Fedora.
If you want a portable USB that you can modify AND flash then... It's a little more complicated. You can always make a bootable Arch USB then rsync in any existing drive but it seems a little complicated.
What you might want to do is create a simple install script. You can pretty much do it for any distro. It will consume more bandwidth than copying/writing an existing distro but will prevent MANY errors.
With Arch it's quite simple. I believe it might be as simple with Debian or any other distro.
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