How-to: Ubuntu Live CD 6.06.1 with Flash 9

Friday, September 15, 2006





Here is a very quick how-to - How to create a Ubuntu Live CD with native Flash 9. This CD is able to boot on both IBM-based PCs as well as Macs.

* get the "Dapper Drake" Ubuntu 6.06.1 Live CD ISO image
* mount the ISO image as part of the filesystem
* copy the ISO contents into a temporary directory
o the stock live CD comes with Windows installers for various free software packages like Firefox and Thunderbird; if you don't need these on your live CD, you can save over 30 MB by deleting the programs/ directory
* mount casper/filesystem.squashfs as part of the filesystem
o use Squashfs and compile the kernel stuff
o alternatively, Gentoo kernels seem to already have the squashfs stuff patched in
* copy the contents into a temporary directory; do this as root and with -a option for a correct copy
* make any necessary modifications to the root filesystem (in my case, this simply means copying libflashplayer.so into the correct directory)
* whittle away any components you don't strictly need for a demo live CD (OpenOffice, with a 200 MB tree, is a good candidate)
* rebuild root filesystem; run as root: 'mksquashfs squashfs-root filesystem.squashfs'
* overwrite the old casper/filesystem.squashfs file with the newly created one
* build burnable, bootable ISO: 'mkisofs -o ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386-custom.iso -b "isolinux/isolinux.bin" -c "isolinux/boot.cat" -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -cache-inodes -r -J -l ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386'
* test: 'qemu -cdrom ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386-custom.iso -boot d -m 256'

Thanx to Mike Melanson at Adobe.com for this cool ubuntu hack.