So, ive finally managed to find a bit of free time now that work allows me the whole weekend to myself so ive been playing around with building a gentoo based livecd. Ive previously tried using catalyst, the official tool used by gentoo to build their livecd’s but its not exactly intuitive so ive been using a somewhat more manual way as detailed over on the gentoo wiki.

As with many wiki articles through its less of a guide and more of a jumble of ideas thrown onto a wiki page, which is a shame as if you dig through the crap there are quite a few handy tips and the basis for some scripts to simplify the process a bit. Ive taken many of these and hacked them around a bit to create something a bit easier to reuse. At the minute theres not much there, really just scripts to automate mounting, unmounting and generating the squashfs and cd image however ive a few more ideas id like to add based on stuff ive found useful while working on my cds.

Hopefully il have a basic x86 cd ready to go sometime in the next few days, sadly i suspect i broke the amd64 one  when i got a little bit carried away tried to use openrc/baselayout2 on the livecd, while mostly it worked a few of the changes seem to have broken the hardware detection scripts used and i cant find any fixes, so looks like im starting from scratch again :(

What i am trying to decide on though is what to include on the livecds in terms of software, so far ive got networkmanager and possibly OSSv4 (initially disabled, but could be a nice way for people to test if it works for them), after that though i get a bit stuck, il probably throw in some more wifi drivers and thats it, im open to suggestions through :)