The FreeBSD LiveCD Tool Set has a main goal, wich is to allow one to generate their own custom FreeBSD Live CDs. FreeBSD LiveCD was born as a Brazilian FreeBSD User Group (www.fugspbr.org) internal project and technical need. The main subject was to create a tool that would allow us a safe diagnostic method, under emergency enviroments and specially as a rescue disk where FreeBSD partitions could only be accessed (mounted) externally.

Despiste The FreeBSD Project officially distribute a "Live" disk, under most circunstances we needed some more functional tool, that could be run directly from an optic drive (CD) without any other intermediate resource. With this goal in mind, the LiveCD Project was started.

Its begin was in the October 5th of 2001, at the time where FUGSPBR (FreeBSD User Group, SP, Brazil) distributed an ISO image with a fully functional FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE LiveCD, that would allow one to access a number of partition types (since FreeBSD native to Linux and even DOS partitions), build a fully operant Firewall, allow networking flow via NAT, working as router and a number of other issues. We experienced a lot of feedback from some users that were trying this pretty first version, and soon many of those users were asking for custom versions of the LiveCD, with mail clients, some extra kernel support (like Bridging and Bandwidth control) and stuff. We had even made a LiveCD ISO that could run as a Desktop Enviroment (http://ftp.unicamp.br/pub/FreeBSD-LiveCD) - with lots of graphical applications. This version was a first one that could even be used as a FreeBSD Demonstration Disk. It had great adoption on our community, but the desire for even more custom versions was far from the end.

There are system requeriments when you are about to create your own custom LiveCD with the FreeBSD LiveCD Tool Set. At this point, you need a box running FreeBSD, and its source (/usr/src/) has to be syncronized with the FreeBSD -STABLE Branch (via cvsup, usually) and you need about 2GB free space under the /usr/local/ slice - this issue can be configured and the path changed - and mkisofs(8). The Tool Set has even a CD Creation routine, so a CD Recorder is always the main requirement when you wish to test your custom LiveCD, despiste it doesn't need to be present at the same machine you are creating the image.

At running time, it's a good idea to have about 64MB Memory, obviously because usually you will mount every Read/Write partition under MFS (memory filesystem) and read-only data will be brought to main memory everytime you need to read it - this issue is even more relevant if you run graphical applications.