Using "penguins eggs" to create a backup or an own bootable .iso

Users Corner Customizations
1

Lately I stumbled across "penguins eggs" and found it to be an amazing helpful and relatively easy, well documented tool.
It turns out that it makes it easy-peasy to just recreate your running system to a .iso file ..... burn it to USB (or copy to a ventoy formatted USB drive) and boot it up as a live system which is also installable.
Note: It wont work with proprietary stuff like nvidia drivers!

So I took it to the test:

And it boots just fine as a live OS and includes the "calamares" installer to install to HD.

signal-2024-12-28-140051_002
signal-2024-12-28-140051_0021152×2048 152 KB

It runs as user 'Elive' with password 'evilE' and ....
Has '"penguins eggs" already installed as well, making it easy to alter or customize the installation to your liking and then create a new .iso from the installed system.
The .iso will also run fine on a virtual machine like "virtualbox", "vmware" or "qemu", so use that option if uyoure short on hardware.

Check out the extensive documentation on how to make it work here:
https://penguins-eggs.gitbook.io/penguins-eggs-book

It really is loads of fun to play with. :happybounce:

On demand I can create a 32bit version too now. :innocent:

1 Like
2

This is cool, thanks for sharing!

3

Having said that ..... it turns out not to be as easy as I expected but that was mainly down to the low spec i386 machines I've got. Ultimately the virtualbox 32bit machine was a lot quicker in "squashing" the filesystem.

So to be equally daunting I created a "non-systemd" version (read Devuan) and turned that into a .iso.
It isn't a clone as such but more of an installable system including Elive Edge (E26) and downloadable here: https://triantares.ddns.net/Elive/uploads/egg-of_debian-bookworm-Elive-Retro_i386_2024-12-31_1427.iso

As mentioned, it's more a Devuan system to play with and it will install along a similar fashion as 3.8.46.and not really a live Retro clone as the amd64 .iso is, nor does it include "penguins' eggs" to muck around with. :innocent:

To install it's just a matter of typing "sudo calamares" (and evilE as password) in a terminal and after finishing and rebooting, you can install whatever you like, including "penguins' eggs" using the instructions on "get-eggs".

Have fun in 2025. :dance:

2 Likes
4

Thank you, it's cool