What Is Linux Live Kit and What Can It Do?

Updated

Linux Live Kit is a set of shell scripts that turns an existing Linux installation into a bootable Live system. You install your favorite distribution to a disk partition or a folder, run the build script, and get an ISO image plus a TAR archive you can write to a USB device. It is a build toolkit, not a ready-made distribution — you supply the Linux system, and Linux Live Kit packages it.

What it actually produces

Running the build script creates two artifacts in /tmp:

  • An ISO image — a bootable CD/DVD image of your system.
  • A TAR archive — the same content packaged for USB devices. You unpack it to the USB device and run bootinst.sh from the boot sub-directory to make the device bootable in both Linux and Windows.

How the build works

The documented workflow has six steps:

  1. Install your distro to a disk partition, or into a folder on your existing system. Debian is recommended but not required.
  2. Verify kernel support for squashfs and either aufs or overlayfs. Most distributions support these automatically.
  3. Remove unnecessary files (optional) to shrink the Live system. The docs specifically recommend removing udev's persistent net rules and similar settings, since they can prevent the system from working correctly on different hardware.
  4. Download Linux Live Kit from GitHub and place it in /tmp. You can read the files in ./DOC/ to understand how it works, and edit .config to modify variables.
  5. Log in as root and run ./build. The ISO is created in /tmp.
  6. For a bootable USB, unpack the generated TAR archive (also in /tmp) to your USB device and run bootinst.sh from the boot sub-directory.

What it improves over the old Linux Live scripts

The project compares itself to the older Linux Live scripts (last released in 2011):

Area Old scripts Linux Live Kit
Union filesystem unionfs aufs or overlayfs — better stability and features
Compression — squashfs with XZ, including BCJ filters
CD tree fixed simplified; you can name your distro anything (slax, knoppix, etc.)
Boot media CD/DVD CD/DVD and USB
Persistent changes — DynFileFS provides dynamic-size storage, even on VFAT or NTFS
Data location — Can load LiveKit data from a different directory or an ISO file
Install script — Makes your device boot in both Linux and Windows

When this is the right tool

Choose Linux Live Kit if you already have a working Linux system you want to turn into a portable, bootable copy — for example, a developer who wants to carry a configured environment on a USB stick, or someone building a custom rescue or demo image. The persistent-changes feature via DynFileFS is the key advantage for USB use, since it lets you save changes even on VFAT or NTFS drives.

It is not the right choice if you want a prebuilt Live distribution to download and run. Linux Live Kit gives you the scripts and the process; the distribution content comes from your own installation.