live cd with nvidia drivers?

[rsdunker]

I work at a computer shop. I have been making ubuntu live cds for a couple years to help test hardware outside of whatever viruses and other crap software people have installed in their os. Generally I use remastersys to create the image. However, it removes all 3d video drivers, for good reasons which I understand.

Does anyone know of a similar program or a way to include the proprietary drivers on a live cd?

If you happen to have any other suggestions for troubleshooting linux live cd's as well I would be happy to hear them. Likewise, I would be happy to share any knowledge I have accumulated. I like to think my live cd is a pretty solid compilation of hardware diagnostics and utilities.

[saikee]

I have not done it with a full distro before but I believe you can install a Linux, put in the drivers, make an iso out of it and create your own Live CD or DVD.

Have you thought about it that way? I mean using mkisofs command.

[rsdunker]

I install ubuntu on a system add and remove the components as needed. But when you create the live cd using remastersys it removes the nvidia drivers.

I have not tried mkisofs. I will check it out.

[ph34r]

I've done it by remastering the Ubuntu live cd following the directions on the ubuntu website. Just wrote a little script called from rc.local that apt-get installs the driver package, runs depmod -a, and restarts the X server.

[retsaw]

Do you really understand why the drivers are removed? I question this because you said remastersys removes the 3D drivers, when according to the website it removes proprietary drivers, and there is a difference because there are open source 3D drivers for ATI/AMD and Nvidia which I would expect remastersys to include (the ATI/AMD ones are certainly there in the standard live CD). A good reason is that the proprietary drivers install their own incompatible 3D libraries, so with the drivers installed you'll only have 3D working with those drivers, therefore it is better for general live CD compatibility to remove them, otherwise you'll need separate liveCDs for ATI/AMD, Nvidia and one for the rest. But they should probably explain this and give you an option to override this behaviour for personal use. I suggest you just include the drivers and their dependencies on the live CD so you can easily install them after you boot from the live CD, then you can restart the X server (using "sudo restart gdm" for Ubuntu) for them to take effect. Now if you did already understand this, I apologise, but the way you worded you question indicated you didn't.

Another alternative to remastersys which you can try is reconstructor there are two versions to download on that site, 2.9 which is standalone and runs on your own computer it works well except for upgrading the kernel for the live CD (at least the last time I tried it, which may have been an older version, I'm not sure) and 3.2.3 which appears to be related to a web-based service, which I haven't tried. I haven't actually tried including the proprietary driver with reconstructor, but I don't think it makes any attempt to remove them, so it should work.