Create a customized Ubuntu Desktop installer CD, without too much fluff.
Acknowledgements to the authors and contributors of all the pages described under Prior Art.
Additional acknowledgements to the overarching Linux and Open Source communities.
This solution is based on other work to customize an Ubuntu install.
This page gives a walkthrough of how to customize the Ubuntu Desktop install CD. It focuses more on customizing the "Live" parts of the CD and not so much on the "Install" parts.
This solution skips over most of the instructions on this page (the LiveCD is untouched, so there's no need to muck about with SquashFS), but the page gives a bit of context as to what's different between how the Desktop CD and the Server CD work (e.g. Casper and Ubiquity).
This page provides instructions for customizing the Ubuntu installer using the Server ISO. It was really helpful in understanding all the steps that the script needed to do.
The main difference between this solution and the steps described on this page
is that we don't build a repo using apt-ftparchive (which means we don't need
to worry about gpg signing keys). Instead, we just stick the debs into extras/
and install them from within a shell using dpkg -i after the rest of the
installer has finished.
This page has a couple example scripts for automating the ISO build. Much of the build script is based on these examples.
This is an end-to-end example of how to preseed the whole Ubuntu install.
Encrypting the disk using a temporary password during the install and then prompting the user to change the encryption password on first boot is a great idea. Unfortunately, preseeding disk encryption doesn't work with Ubiquity in Vivid (15.04) or Wily (15.10) (see bug #1386153). However, it's a great example of how to do additional setup work in a post-install hook (see Workstation Auto Install Scripts), and this solution totally rips off that whole concept.
The wget command used by the build script to download the upstream ISO totally
rips off the example on this page.
- root access (e.g. sudo privileges... see TODOs)
- wget (
apt-get install wget) - rsync (
apt-get install rsync) - mkisofs (
apt-get install genisoimage)
- Clone this repo.
- Add extra packages (.deb files) under
extras/ - Run
build_desktop_cd.shas the root user (e.g.sudo build_desktop_cd.sh) - Do something with the resulting
ubuntu-$VERSION-desktop-$ARCH-custom.iso(burn it to a disk, install it on a flash drive, etc.)
Root privileges are needed to mount the upstream iso (for extracting its contents) and to modify the preseed and md5sum files. The mounting problem could be solved with fuseiso, but that wouldn't solve the file permissions problem.