walkthrough

Clonezilla Custom Live ISO

Introduction

Create a Live ISO version of Clonezilla with personal customizations. A bootable ISO will be produced with options to:

run the custom embeded script (default boot option)
run as a default official version

In this guide I will adopt 3 custom files for the boot and 1 custom script to be embeded

File	Description
grub.cfg	Custom version of the clonezilla released one
isolinux.cfg	Custom version of the clonezilla released one
syslinux.cfg	Custom version of the clonezilla released one
ocs-custom	Custom Script

Steps

Preparations

Download in this folder the latest available Zip version; for personal choices I opted for:

Release: Stable (Debian based)
CPU architecture: AMD64 (uEFI support)

Install the required software

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install squashfs-tools xorriso

Create a variable with the name and version for an easy future update

myfile=clonezilla-live-2.6.7-28-amd64

Create subfolders to keep all organized

mkdir -p ./custom/{zip-tmp,squashfs-tmp}

Operations

Unzip the downloaded zip file

unzip "$myfile".zip -d ./custom/zip-tmp`

Unpack the original filesystem.squashfs

sudo unsquashfs -d ./custom/squashfs-tmp/squashfs-root/ ./custom/zip-tmp/live/filesystem.squashfs

Include the custom script ocs-custom in the new filesystem.squashfs

sudo cp ./cfg/ocs-custom ./custom/squashfs-tmp/squashfs-root/usr/sbin/ocs-custom
sudo chmod 755 ./custom/squashfs-tmp/squashfs-root/usr/sbin/ocs-custom

Create the custom filesystem.squashfs and replace the old one

sudo rm -rf ./custom/squashfs-tmp/filesystem.squashfs.new
sudo mksquashfs ./custom/squashfs-tmp/squashfs-root ./custom/squashfs-tmp/filesystem.squashfs.new -b 1024k -comp xz -Xbcj x86 -e boot -info -check-data
sudo cp ./custom/squashfs-tmp/filesystem.squashfs.new ./custom/zip-tmp/live/filesystem.squashfs

Update the loader menu files; the main changes are:

default new entry to lunch our script
choice timer reduced

options modified: quite (removed), noeject (added), locales (configured to en_US.UTF-8), keyboard-layouts (configured to it)

cp ./cfg/grub.cfg ./custom/zip-tmp/boot/grub/grub.cfg
cp ./cfg/isolinux.cfg ./custom/zip-tmp/syslinux/isolinux.cfg
cp ./cfg/syslinux.cfg ./custom/zip-tmp/syslinux/syslinux.cfg
sudo chmod 644 ./custom/zip-tmp/{boot/grub/grub.cfg,syslinux/isolinux.cfg,syslinux/syslinux.cfg}

Create the custom personalized Clonezilla ISO and hash it for future checks

xorriso -as mkisofs -R -r -J -joliet-long -l -cache-inodes -iso-level 3 -isohybrid-mbr ./custom/squashfs-tmp/squashfs-root/usr/lib/ISOLINUX/isohdpfx.bin -partition_offset 16 -A "$myfile"-custom -V "$myfile" -b syslinux/isolinux.bin -c syslinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -eltorito-alt-boot --efi-boot boot/grub/efi.img -isohybrid-gpt-basdat -isohybrid-apm-hfsplus ./custom/zip-tmp/ -o ./"$myfile"-custom.iso
md5sum "$myfile"-custom.iso > "$myfile"-custom.iso.md5
sha1sum "$myfile"-custom.iso > "$myfile"-custom.iso.sha1
sha256sum "$myfile"-custom.iso > "$myfile"-custom.iso.sha256
sha512sum "$myfile"-custom.iso > "$myfile"-custom.iso.sha512

Now you can burn it on a CD/DVD or on a USB Drive; for the USB drive you can use with dd

lsblk
sudo dd if="$myfile"-custom.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress

replace sdX with the correct dev