Remasterme PCLinuxOS I A Gem Tool for Home Users

PCLinuxOS offers a small but nice package called "mklivecd" that will make an identical , and exact clone of your system if ran properly.

This tool will let you make a clean ISO of your custom made PCLinuxOS which you can write to a CD/DVD depending upon the size of the ISO that was generated from your running system.


A simple command "mklivecd new.iso" as root in shell will do the job for you promptly and without much haste. I have tried it many times and my copies of remastered PCLinuxOS are perfectly out of the box on my system in case I ever need to do a fresh install .

PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime comes with a GUI for mklivecd or remaster. It works fine too but the choice of adding extra options in adding advanced configuration of your remaster copy is little confusing and I did not find any documentations for it either. Besides it also failed on me many times while I was trying to make a remaster copy so I quit using it . But I guess it might work for others as Texstar and his team has spent lots of efforts in making this tools with GUI so it has to work or else they won`t include it in PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime.

I urge all home users to try using this nice tool to have a back up of their systems. There are few important points to be borne in mind before you plan to make a remaster of your system.

1: It is better to make a remaster of custom built functional system which worked for you flawlessly.
2. Remove all cache by ~apt-get clean command before you make your remaster as this will clean all unwanted data and lessen the size of your ISO .
3. Remove all data from your home directory because it will be copied into your ISO automatically increasing the size of your ISO.
4. Once you have successfully generated the ISO, do its md5sums and write it down so that you can later compare the md5sums of your burned CD/DVD and your remastered ISO.
5. Use CDRW/DVDRW for burning your remastered ISO as you would be making more and more ISOs later and you can always write them to same media.

I hope these small notes will help a lot of people to benefit from this amazing package that PCLinuxOS offers. I am sure it works for everybody as it does for me.