Posted March 5th, 2007 in Guides

In December 2006, the Fedora Linux distribution released its first official Live CD, which, thanks to an intelligent selection of applications, nicely advertises the best features of Fedora. In addition to many applications, the Live CD has several games, uses the Compiz 3D desktop, and is accessible by non-English speaking users. But what stole the show for me was David Zeuthen’s livecd tools, which make creating and maintaining a custom Fedora-based Live CD a walk in the park.

Zeuthen is the developer of Pilgrim, which creates system images that can run off USB flash drives for the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC; see Resources for a link to more information). The livecd tools used for creating the Fedora Live CD is a rewrite of Pilgrim in Python. It can be used for creating live CDs out of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and other downstream Fedora distributions.

Before getting down to making your own Live CD, you need to understand how a Fedora release is assembled, distributed, and maintained. The Fedora project keeps packages in two publicly accessible repositories. The repository maintained by official Fedora developers is called the “core” repository, while the one maintained by contributors and the community is called the “extras” repository. A repository is simply a collection of packages. Apart from the core and extras, there are several third-party repositories such as Livna and FreshRPM.

A Fedora Core distribution contains all the packages in the core repository, the latest being Fedora Core 6. The first official Fedora Live CD is based on packages in Fedora Core 6 and the extras repository. The livecd tools have been submitted for inclusion in Fedora’s extras repository, which will be merged with the core repository by the time Fedora 7 is released.

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