Remastering a Linux antiX bootable USB drive

February

2025

Remastering a Linux antiX bootable USB drive

Linux

27 February 2025 16:44

"Remastering" is the process of reassembling a product to improve its performance.

Reassembly of the antiX bootable flash drive is performed in the utility "antiX Live Remaster":

Step 1. launching the Remastering utility in Menu - Applications - antiX - Remaster.

Step 2. in the "Remaster" application I selected the type remaster-type: General

Step 3. do you want to keep the files under /home in the new remaster?

Yes.

Step 4. if you have previously remastered and there are temporary files left, you will be asked what to do with them: “The remaining files have been found. Do you want to solve this problem now?”
Yes.

Step 5. in the list for cleaning "Cleaning UP": linuxfs.old ->Delete It

Step 6. warning before deleting rootfs.old file - "Should it be deleted?" -Yes.

Step 7 everything is ready to create a new remastering file. Pay attention to the size of the created (new) linuxfs file with the operating system: depending on the compression algorithm, it may differ. The zstd method is of interest - the balance between speed and compression force.Get started? Yes.

Step 8 compression type - selected zstd(it supports compression and decompression on multiple CPU cores). To save maximum space on your flash drive, you can choose xz, but this algorithm is not suitable for older processors, for which it is better suited lz4.

Step 9"Do you want to use all cores for remastering?" -Yes

Step 10 come up with any name for the assembly. (Optional)

At first startup, the operating system will prompt users to create new passwords root и demo.

Step 11 reboot the computer. Let's look at RAM consumption. Should be about 230 MB. This means that the rootfs has become almost zero in size and when overlayfs is loaded into RAM, it no longer deals with the changes file of the “root” folder. All changes are included in linuxfs.

Step 12 when you shut down (Menu - Shut down - Let's get started? Yes) or when you call the utility "antiX - Saving the root folder" you can see how thin the rootfs file has become - 1 MiB out of 300 MiB.

Problems and solutions

If the OS does not start after remastering, the solution is to enable the boot option "rollback", available in the boot menu.

This was written on the antiX fan forum:

https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Remaster:

Live Remaster Download Options

There are only two options for loading Live Remaster, since Live Remastering is handled almost entirely by the Live-Remaster program.

There are only two options - prevent Live Remastering and rollback Live Remastering in case something goes completely wrong.

noremaster

Add the "noremaster" boot option to the grub or syslinux boot line if you know early (before booting the new updated system) that you don't want to use it for some reason.

quiet splasht disable=lxF noremaster

rollback

Add a "rollback" boot option to the grub or syslinux boot line if for some reason the computer is unable to boot into a recently updated system (or for any other reason you may have).

quiet splasht disable=lxF rollback

Cleaning a USB drive from copies of files after remastering (optional)

Optional steps (to free up free space on a USB flash drive)

Step 1. if the computer successfully boots from Live USB after remastering, you can delete the backup files in Menu - Applications - antiX - Save Setup.