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Pretty much all I want to change is the theme, icons, login screens, logo's, wallpapers etc. but I want a .iso that keeps the theme changes I made and can be installed on my brother's/friend's/family's computer like it was a brand new install of Ubuntu stripped of my personal info, but not the theme changes. I just want to simplify it for them a bit. Almost like a new distro, but not. Just a face lift that can be distributed to less tech informed people in the community.

Any help?

Morne Venter
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1 Answers1

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Ubuntu Customization Kit (UCK)

Install Ubuntu Customization Kit (UCK) from the Software Center. UCK does everything in the Install CD Customization Wiki for you (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomization).

To use UCK, you will also need the package libfribidi-bin.

From the command line, install these using...

sudo apt-get install libfribidi-bin uck

UCK starts off with a GUI interface, but you do have to make your personalizations using the command line. Be sure to select "Run console application" which will give you a command line window in which you can modify your new iso and use apt-get to install software; remember this is a root shell in a chroot environment, so you don't need sudo (I'm not sure if you can run GUI applications out of there, but you can try; you might have to export your display).

Personalization / Customization

Here are some tips to personalize your iso from the UCK command line terminal:

Common File Locations

If you don't use apt-get to install your themes, backgrounds, or icons, you can

  • Place new backgrounds inside /usr/share/backgrounds/.
  • Place new icons inside /usr/share/icons/.
  • Place new themes inside /usr/share/themes/.

After installing them, you can select specific themes, backgrounds, or icons as defaults in the next step.

Default Settings

If you want to set default themes, fonts, icons, etc. you can create a file called 11_ubuntu-settings.gschema.override and place it in /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/. Here is an example file. The items in brackets correspond to schemas found in dconf Editor. Install dconf Editor in your current, non-UCK environment, using sudo apt-get install dconf-tools and copy your curent settings. This takes a little digging, but is not hard to do, especially if you use the Find feature of dconf Editor.

I think the examples below are self explanatory and should be enough to get you started, but you can research the specific settings you want. These settings will be applied during installation from your new iso and to all new users created after Ubuntu has been installed using your new iso.

[com.canonical.unity-greeter]
xft-hintstyle = 'hintfull'

[org.gnome.desktop.background]
show-desktop-icons = true

[org.gnome.desktop.interface]
icon-theme = "fs-icons-ubuntu-mono-dark"
document-font-name = 'Liberation Sans 10'
font-name = 'Liberation Sans 10'
monospace-font-name = 'Liberation Mono 9'

[org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences]
titlebar-font = 'Ubuntu Bold 10'

[org.gnome.nautilus.preferences]
click-policy = 'single'
show-image-thumbnails = 'always'

[org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings]
hinting = 'full'

After creating this file inside the UCK environment, you must run the following command inside the UCK console terminal.

glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

Other Customizations

The above were just some examples, based on your original question. You'll have to research what other changes you want to make, and where to make them within the file structure in the UCK command line window. For more information, you can read through the Install CD Customization Wiki (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomization).

Create Live USB

Type exit to close the UCK command line window and use the UCK GUI to complete creating the .iso file. Note, there is a small bug in UCK (https://bugs.launchpad.net/uck/+bug/1245981) where the remastered iso will have a home directory with your user id in it. This is probably inconsequential to you.

UCK will create your new remastered Live iso image in

~/tmp/remaster-new-files

Once your iso is complete, you can create a bootable USB using Startup Disk Creator. Install it from the Software Center, or using

sudo apt-get install usb-creator-gtk

If Startup Disk Creator has a problem writing to your USB, first format it to fat32 and set the "bootable" flag using gparted. Install gparted from the Software Center, or using

sudo apt-get install gparted
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