[gentoo-user] Re: On what to base a custom live CD?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2010-11-25, Helmut Jarausch <jarausch@××××××××××××××××.de> wrote:

> I'd suggest SystemRescueCD.

That was my first thought, but it's not going to 

> It's upgraded quite often (currently using kernel 2.6.35-x) has a
> ready to go X11 environment and most useful, it's an up-to-date
> Gentoo system, so one immediately knows where to look if there are
> any problems. And it has a well documented (easy) procedure for
> extending it.

But, I'm going to have to speed up the boot time considerably:

>> I thought about using a customized systemrescuecd, but that takes
>> ages to boot (almost 5 minutes).  This CD is intended as something a
>> customer can run to do a quick hardware test, and making them sit
>> there for 5 minutes to see a 5-second test just isn't going to fly.

The current version of the liveCD I'm attempting to replace boots in
about 10 seconds on the same machine that takes 5 minutes to boot
systemrescue CD.  Slowing the boot time that much isn't going to be
acceptable.  I'm trying to figure out ways to speed up systemrescuecd.

I may ditch the squashfs stuff entirely and run from the initrd
filesystem.  It looks like that should save a minute or two.

After that I'm going to try disabling Networking and most block device
(IDE, PATA, floppy, SCSI, and SATA) support.

-- 
Grant