Making a custom Fedora CD

In this lab I've used a tool called 'pungi' to create Fedora custom spin.

The first step is to install pungi, so on the command line issue the command:
#yum install pungi -y

I used this kickstart file for lab:

repo --name=release --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-9&arch=$basearch
repo --name=updates --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f9&arch=$basearch

%packages --nobase
bash
kernel
passwd
policycoreutils
chkconfig
authconfig
rootfiles
anaconda-runtime

%end


Once you have the kickstart file, from command line you can issue the command:
#pungi -c NameofKickstart.cfg --nosource --force --ver=F9

This command will create a ISO image form that file. You can burn the image and try it out or you can even use the 'qeum' to test it first.

How to create a slideshow

In this lab I've used the tool called "dvd-slideshow" to create slides.

So the first step is to install it, on a terminal issue the command:
#yum install dvd-slideshow -y

You should have your directory ready with all the pictures. Say your directory is Pics

#dir2slideshow -n "Pics" -t 2 Pics/

There are many more options you can use and modify it, check the man pages for it.
If the above command returned an error like "Creating ac3 audio ERROR during ffmpeg execution!"
then you need to edit the file called /usr/bin/dvd-slideshow, edit line 661 to "ac3=0"

Try the previous command again and it should work. Now it has created a Pics.vob file which can be viewed using mplayer.

Creating your own Fedora Live CD

There are tools in Fedora repository for building live CD's. 'livecd-tools' is nice tool for generating live CD's on Fedora based systems including derived distributions such as RHEL, CentOS and others.
So first install this utility by issuing the command on terminal as root:
#yum install livecd-tools

After you install that utility, you'll see some kickstart files in /usr/share/livecd-tools dir. For my experiment I tried using one of the kickstart files from here. I choose the minimal kickstart file first. To create a ISO image of this file, issue the command 'livecd-creator --config=/usr/share/livecd-tools/livecd-fedora-minimal.ks'. Now you should have the ISO image for your kickstart file. You can test your live CD using QEUM. For that first install qeum (yum install kvm qeum -y).
Than issue the command #qeum-kvm -m 512 -cdrom YourFileName.iso.
I was not able to successfully create my live CD, I got some missing module error. Next I am gonna use some other kickstart file and try to create live CD based on it.