Is there any way of going from virtual machine to live cd?

Question

I think it would be really nice to be able to get a live cd from the operating system of a virtual machine. Is there any virtualization software that has this capabilities?

Answer 1

CD's are, by definition, non-rewritrable media, which makes them unusable for OS's installations (live-cd's are working by creating a RAM disk in which they can store temporary files and settings, which are lost upon reboot).

Answer 2

Actually, the answer is yes. The trick is to realize that the archival of the system is as as Livecd cdrom+ramdisk or Livecd cdrom+ramdisk+usb flash drive system.

There is a tool for Ubuntu that will create a LiveCD derived from an installation.

I would imagine that using something like casper-rw, you could keep writing changes to a usb flash drive.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/creating-custom-ubuntu-live-cd-with-remastersys.html

Answer 3

The boot process for a CD vs. an HDD are different, as well as the entire layout of the disk. You cannot simply image a hard drive, put it on a CD and boot from it. There would have to be a heavy-weight conversion process to handle this, as well as to set up the appropriate RAM disk behavior that bongo described.

This would be a good thread for people who actually work on live-cd software to chime in on.

Answer 4

You can create a 'portable' virtual machine from any windows computer (virtual or physical) with MojoPac. However, it's not bootable, MojoPac requires another Windows host.