Grml Blog

Debian based Linux Live system

Remastering Grml without modifying the squashfs or create your own customized Grml CDs

In our last Blog entry about remastering Grml 2011.12 we described a method remastering Grml with grml-live, the tool used to generate the official Grml ISOs.

Often you don’t need all the power and flexibility of grml-live but just want to add or change some default boot parameters and use this as your default image. For example you may want to have an ISO image which automatically starts sshd and sets the password to a specific value or downloads an executable and run it at startup. This can easily be done with grml2iso a tool based on grml2usb which allows you to create customized iso images.

Grml will automatically start sshd and set the password for the grml user if you specify the ssh boot-parameter. This allows you to remotely control your Grml CD. To create such a CD just run:

grml2iso -b “ssh=grml-password” -o my_grml.iso ./grml64_2011.12.iso

This will create a modified Grml ISO named my_grml.iso and add the bootparameter ssh=grml-password to all the existing boot-entries.

grml2usb does not offer the same flexibility as grml-live but grml2usb/grml2iso is often good enough to help you to achieve what you want without the need to modify the squashfs file.