Build your own custom Ubuntu distro

Why settle for what the existing distributions have to offer? Michael Reed looks at Cubic, a tool for creating your own custom respin based on Ubuntu.

-  Michael Reed

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When you modify an Ubuntu distribution that makes use of a live CD environment, using Cubic, you’re also modifying the live environment. This means that Cubic is perfect for making a bootable ISO with some extra tools on it. All you need to do is select ‘Try Ubuntu’ when it starts up.

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There are a lot of Linux utilities for remixing an existing distribution floating about, but we found that most of them aren’t maintained! This means that they only work properly with distributions that are now out of date. Even if they seem to work, chances are they’ll fall over halfway through the process or what they produce won’t work properly.

Part of the beauty of Linux is the freedom of deployment that distributions offer, but when installing it for yourself or others you’ll want to change things. So, why not make your own version, or ‘respin’? That’s what a tool called Cubic is for, and we’re going to look at how you use it to modify the standard Ubuntu installation ISO and bend it to your will in terms of content and aesthetics.

As for the difficulty? If you can install packages from the command line and boot from an ISO in a virtual machine, you should find it easy to get started with Cubic as the defaults were always usable in our experience. We’ll start with the simplest example of just adding some new packages and rebuilding the ISO. This modified ISO can be used as an installer or as a live desktop environment.