Creating an USB image that boots to a single GUI app from scratch

Every now and than you might want or need to create a custom Linux install that boots from a USB stick, starts a single GUI application and keeps running that until the user turns off the power. As an example at a former workplace I created an application for downloading firmware images from an internal server and flashing those. The idea there was that even non-technical people could walk up to the computer, plug in their device via USB and push a button to get it flashed.

Creating your own image based on latest stable turns out to be relatively straightforward, though there are a few pitfalls. The steps are roughly the following:

1. Create a Debian boostrap install
2. Add dependencies of your program and things like X, Network Manager etc
3. Install your program
4. Configure the system to automatically login root on boot
5. Configure root to start X upon login (but only on virtual terminal 1)
6. Create an .xinitrc to start your application upon X startup

Information on creating a bootable Debian live image can easily be found on the Internet. Unfortunately information on setting up the boot process is not as easy to find, but is instead scattered all over the place. A lot of documentation still refers to the sysvinit way of doing things that won't work with systemd. Rather than try to write yet another blog post on the subject I instead created a script to do all that automatically. The code is available in this Github repo. It's roughly 250 lines of Python.

Using it is simple: insert a fresh USB stick in the machine and see what device name it is assigned to. Let's assume it is /dev/sdd. Then run the installer:

sudo ./createimage.py /dev/sdd

Once the process is complete and you can boot any computer with the USB stick to see this:

This may not look like much but the text in the top left corner is in fact a PyGTK program. The entire thing fits in a 226 MB squashfs image and takes only a few minutes to create from scratch. Expanding the program to have the functionality you want is then straightforward. The Debian base image takes care of all the difficult things like hardware autodetection, network configuration and so on.

Problems and points of improvement

The biggest problem is that when booted like this the mouse cursor is invisible. I don't know why. All I could find were other people asking about the same issue but no answers. If someone knows how to fix this, patches are welcome.

The setup causes the root user to autologin on all virtual terminals, not just #1.

If you need to run stuff like PulseAudio or any other thing that requires a full session, you'll probably need to install a full DE session and use its kiosk mode.

This setup runs as root. This may be good. It may be bad. It depends on your use case.

For more complex apps you'd probably want to create a DEB package and use it to install dependencies rather than hardcoding the list in the script as is done currently.