Walltop

WallTop computers... recycle an old laptop by removing all the extraneous parts such as the cdrom drive, floppy drive, (dead) battery and then hanging it on the wall.

I am building one from an old Dell Inspiron 3700.

Operating system

I looked at using Debian, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux (which immediately panics on boot), and Movix. I decided I might as well stick with Ubuntu so I am building a custom Live CD. I will then transfer it to a Compact Flash card, which will be plugged into an adapter and replace the incredibly noisy stock 4200 rpm hard drive.

See http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-customize-your-ubuntu-live-cd

Oh! This was a bad idea. Much stuff about Ubuntu live cd's has been deleted from this page!

The way to do this is Debian Live!

Debian Live wiki

Building an USB/HDD image

FluxBox

After installing the live-cd packages on my Ubuntu based build host

lh_clean --binary
lh_config -b usb-hdd -k 686 --bootstrap-flavour minimal --packages-lists "stripped" --binary-indices disabled --memtest "disabled" --packages "x-window-system-core fluxbox openssh-server vlc gnash portmap nfs-common autofs debconf-english" --bootappend-live "nolocales"

I build on a 64 bit machine so I have to say -k 686 to get the 32 bit kernel

Doing customizations, do this

lh_config
lh_bootstrap
lh_chroot
lh_chroot_hosts install
lh_chroot_resolv install
lh_chroot_proc install
chroot chroot
 #do the hacks here
lh_chroot_hosts remove
lh_chroot_resolv remove
lh_chroot_proc remove
lh_binary

instead of

lh_build

Copy image to CF: dd if=binary.img of=${USBSTICK}

To test image, start in qemu or convert img file to a vmdk and use vmware

To use in walltop, transfer CF to laptop and boot it

Customization that I might want to do

other codecs???
emacs21-nox
libcurl3
realplayer?
firefox - use iceweasel
flash - use gnash??

adduser bwilson
adduser kiosk
Give root a password 
Copy in .ssh directories for root and bwilson