Building

In order to build your own personalized copy of a ButtonOS CD you should probably start with a Debian Squeeze machine.

The build process is based on Debian's Live-Build. It is possible, theoretically, to use another distribution, but that is untested.

For the most part you don't need to understand the mechanics of the live-build system, unless you wish to do some serious customization. Just check out the repository here, run lb clean ;lb config; lb build from the ButtonOS directory.

An important customization you may wish to do is to add the noroot boot time option. This prevents usage by anyone using the CD to obtain root permissions. There is a file in auto/, config this has a line --bootappend-live="" add the word noroot to this line before the trailing ". This will disallow root access to the machine.

As a general rule do not expect lb build to work like make. Changes to the configuration can have far reaching consequences. It is better to clean your build tree lb clean, re run the configuration lb config and build the CD, lb build. The packages are cached, so that this isn't quite as net intensive task as might seem.

live-build has some excellent documentation, and the man pages are included on your system. man live-build will give you an overview. Details on each of the steps above can be had by reading the man page on the individual commands. each of the commands is documented in a man page with a _ replacing the initial space. For example, to read the page on the lb clean step the man command would be man lb_clean