Re: HOWTO create a localized live CD

[Terance Edward Sola <terance lyse net>]

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