Knoppix made live CDs popular—and with good reason too. Do you want to check whether a distribution works well with your hardware, or to show off the latest Compiz Fusion magic, or maybe you have a presentation to do and you want to make sure you have the same environment to show it in as you had to create it? A live CD can help with all of these scenarios. However, until recently you had to read through some pretty dense documentation to make any customisations. Now, Fedora 7 is out and Revisor is here to help you create any kind of live system you can imagine, in 7 easy steps.

In this article, I’m going to be creating a live CD with a custom package set. If you have slightly different goals in mind, follow along anyway as the process for creating a live CD/DVD/USB image is virtually identical, as is the process for creating any kind of non-live installation media. I’ll also assume that you are running a working Fedora 7 system with access to the Fedora repositories (networked or locally).

All of the software you need to create a live CD can be found in the Fedora repository

Step 1—install Revisor

All of the software you need to create a live CD can be found in the Fedora repository, so you can install Revisor and its dependencies in one of two ways:

• su -c "yum install revisor" from the command line
• Applications→Add/Remove Programs, search for Revisor, mark it for installation and then click Apply.

Once the installation is finished, launch Revisor by using its menu entry found under Applications→System Tools→Revisor. You’ll be presented with the welcome screen, explaining a bit about the software and where it’s come from. Obviously, to get things started click Get Started!

Figure 1: Welcome to Revisor!

Step 2—Select your media

The next screen asks you to select what kind of media you would like to create. As I said before, I’m going to be creating a live CD, but in many situations this might not be appropriate; below is a brief summary of what you can expect from each type of media and possible reasons for using it.

Installation media types

• DVD Set—creates a DVD (or DVD set) that will boot into the Anaconda system installer. Gives the greatest flexibility for an installed system as it has the most space to play with.
• CD Set—creates a CD (or CD set) that will boot into the Anaconda system installer. It’s useful if you don’t have a DVD drive available. Revisor will automatically split the image into multiple CD ISOs if needed, with disc one being bootable and the others holding packages.

Live media types

• Optical Live Media—creates either a live CD or DVD (depending on the amount of data to be included). Boots into the working desktop environment of your choice, with many customisations available through the use of a kickstart configuration file.
• USB Live Media—this option is not yet available for Revisor (it will be in the near future). If you want this functionality, it can be performed from the command line using the livecd-iso-to-disk script, which converts a live CD ISO image to work on a USB stick.

Select which ever option is more suitable to your circumstances and then click Forward.

Step 3—Revisor configuration

Each run of Revisor uses two configuration files: the first can be thought of as an index, pointing to a number of different repository configurations you can use; the second holds the information about the repositories, such as URI etc. By default Revisor uses the file revisor.conf, found in /etc/revisor/ as the first configuration file, and points to one of a number of example files in /etc/revisor/conf.d/ for the repository information.

A kickstart file allows you to specify a large number of options, saving you from having to manually configure them every time you create a live CD

By default these files give you a wide range of possibilities, including media based on Fedora 6, 7 or development, and targeted at the i386, PPC or x86_64 architectures (specified through the “Configuration section to use” drop down menu).

This is probably sufficient for most circumstances; however, if you want to use a local repository, or to add a third party repository not included with Fedora by default, you will have to edit a configuration file. The simplest way to do this is to edit one of the existing entries; for example, to use Revisor to create a Fedora 7 based system from a local repository, you would edit the file /etc/revisor/conf.d/revisor-f7-i386.conf, and edit the line that starts with baseurl to point at the folder containing your local repository. The same would be true for a remote, third party repository.

If you do choose to edit one of these configuration files, be sure to hit the refresh button in Revisor so that the latest information is loaded. Once this is done, you can choose which repositories to enable using the check-boxes below, and specify the directory where the ISO will be outputted to. Make sure you remember this! Once again, click Next.