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 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 -a i386 -b usb-hdd -k 686 --packages "x-window-system-core fluxbox firefox vlc openssh-server"
# I build on a 64 bit machine so I have to say -k 686 to get the 32 bit kernel
(Customizations should go here)
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

codecs???
emacs21-nox
libcurl3
realplayer
flash

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