Use archiso for custom Linux boot disks

After reviving my old Thinkpad X230 I looked for a way to automate the installation of a Linux system with a minimal desktop. The idea was to have a “conference laptop” which can be reinstalled after each use.

tl;dr: The code including a detailed README can be found on my GitHub profile.

Installation Media

Some media to boot the installer from is necessary. I decided to use archiso, the live system used by Arch Linux to run it’s installer. Arch Linux also ships debootstrap in the package repository, which makes it possible to install Arch Linux, Ubuntu and Debian from the same live system.

The easy way

The subfolder archiso in my repo contains a Dockerfile and some shell scripts to build the ISO image inside of a Docker container.

For an easy start, my iac repo can be cloned to a machine with Docker installed.

• Build the Docker Container: ./archiso/build.sh
• Build the ISO image: ./archiso/pack.sh

The manual way

The Arch Linux package archiso provides the tool mkarchiso.

To begin with a custom ISO image, the profile which is also used to create the official Arch Linux ISOs can be copied: cp -r /usr/share/archiso/configs/releng/ ~/archiso.

The file packages.x86_64 controls which packages will be installed in the ISO image, in profiledef.sh various metadata and other settings can be set. The folder airootfs/ contains all custom files and folders which should be added to the ISO.

To execute commands at build time, the script airootfs/root/customize_airootfs.sh can be used. For example enabling systemd services or to make changes on configuration files.

Then build the ISO image: mkarchiso -v -w ~/archiso-tmp -o ~/output ~/archiso

More details can be found on the archiso wiki page.