Customizing Linux with Remastersys

Introduction

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Remastersys is one of the tools available to customize an installed Linux system, and save it into an ISO file that you use to install that release on other PC's. In this article, I'll use a live Ubuntu as an example.

Mylivecd, Reconstructor, and relinux are alternatives to Remastersys.

Install

As Remastersys is a GUI application (Python + Glade) you will have to run it in an X session.

  1. wget -O - http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu/remastersys.gpg.key | apt-key add -
  2. vi /etc/apt/sources.list

    #Remastersys Oneiric
    deb http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu oneiric main
     
  3. apt-get update
  4. apt-get install remastersys
  5. vi /etc/remastersys.conf
  6. remastersys dist

/etc/remastersys.conf

Usage

Before running Remastersys, you might want to remove stuff you don't need.

Find space used in each directory

du -sh /*

Cleaning application cache

To make sure there are not .deb package files left in the cache in /var/cache/apt/archives, since you can (re)install applications by fetching them from a depot on the Net:

apt-get clean

Removing unneeded packages

  1. apt-get install debian-goodies
  2. dpigs (-n 20 to display the twenty biggest packages)

Note that uninstalling in application through apt-get won't remove the icons in the Unity bar.

Resources