Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Disabling Install on Live CD's

 

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 13:15, Darksyde <m_alexander61@yahoo.com> wrote:
>  How would I go about disabling the Install feature on a distro (most often it'll be Ubuntu or a
> derivative) before burning it to disk?  I'd like to feel more comfortable giving out distro's to
> friends and knowing that they can't accidentally install the system would be of great
> comfort.
>  Thanks,
>  Mark

The short answer is this:

extract the ISO's contents to a directory.
edit all the stuff that does installing (any boot loader entries,
desktop links, etc)
rebuild new ISO images.
Burn new ISO images.

That is all...

Do some reading on rolling your own bootable ISO images for tips on
how to actually do this. It's semi-trivial, meaning it's not hard,
but it can be a complicated process.

Also, does it really matter. It's really HARD to accidentally install
an OS. If the ISO includes a "Install OS" boot option, usually they
have to specifically select that, then they have to manually do some
things IN the installer, getting past at least one or two screens that
say "Installing $OS". If it only provides an install option from
within the live system, via a tool, or desktop link, then they have to
actively click that link or tool, and again pass the "I'm going to
INSTALL on your computer" screens, as well as do a few other things
and actually say OK to the "do you want to continue and install this
over your computer" screens that most installers come with.

I can't, off hand, really think of any Linux OS that comes with an
automatic, hands-off, destructive installation option that doesn't
require some sort of user involvement (e.g. selecting the destructive
option at boot as it's not the default, booting in a PXE environment
with an auto-boot script like autoyast.xml or ks.cfg).

Even the windows install disks don't just automatically destroy a
working system when you boot from them (with the exception of special
ISOs specifically built for quickly installing OEM systems, and even
then those are usually installed via disk imaging than actual
installation).

Cheers,

Jeff

--

Ted Turner - "Sports is like a war without the killing." -
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/ted_turner.html

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