I found an interesting article in the newest edition (issue 16) of the Full Circle Magazine about remastering an Ubuntu disk. I decided to try it for myself. I wanted to see if I could make presents for my family (I give each member of my family Ubuntu CDs every year in December and for their birthdays). By remastering a disk could give them something that was half made by me. I decided to install programs onto the disk that I thought would be useful to each person.
For my grandparents I would likely give them some games and an email client along with OpenOffice. As my nana loves to play Hoyle, a very old game that makes her XP machine (which I just reinstalled because they had a thriving spyware and virus infestation), turn on compatibility mode for Hoyle since it is so old.
My grandpa loves email and he works for his strata (as my nana calls it, “Mayor”), so he needs an office application that would work for his needs. He uses Outlook Express and Microsoft Works on a machine that has a Sempron processor. I think he would enjoy the speed of his computer much more then he does with XP on it. He does not really like to try new things, so I might have to work on him a little bit harder to try Ubuntu. (When I had to reinstall Windows on the computer he was really nervous and almost said that he would rather have it with the spyware on it. I finally talked him out of that and told him that he would have a faster computer then he did before the reinstallation.)
My aunt has problems with her new Dell. It seems to be shutting down for some reason. I am not sure if I can stop that unless I can figure out what is going wrong. I might just try my remastered live DVD her laptop. Who knows, it may just work out fine.
Here is how to download the remastering application: It’s called Remastersys. If you click the link it will take you to the site to download the deb file which will install onto your Debian based system.
This is the end of the first part of my series on how to remaster Ubuntu. Join me again tomorrow to create the ISO image.
One response to “How to Remaster Ubuntu – Part 1 of 2”
About the Dell system that’s shutting down for no reason – if there’s no BSOD or significant events in Event Viewer, it may be bad hardware. I had a failing PSU that caused exactly this problem with a relative’s PC – until the shutdown happened while I was using it, I didn’t really think of a hardware problem. It was fixed by using a new PSU (I recommend Corsair VX450W as it’s very reliable and quiet), but I ended up building her a new PC anyway.
Thanks for the tips about Remastersys.