Save space used by an Ubuntu VM by using the live CD

I like to use VMs when doing things which might put stuff all over the filesystem or needs root access to install. But at a few gigabytes each they quickly take up space. I managed to use the live CD image as a base, which is compressed and can be shared among virtual machines.

1. Create a virtual machine with a hard disk of your choosing. Boot the Ubuntu live CD in it.

2. Create a partition on the virtual hard disk for persistence, and make it bootable.

3. Format it, give it a label:

   $ sudo bash
   # mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda1 -L overlay
   

    # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

    # mkdir /mnt/boot

    # cp -p /cdrom/casper/vmlinuz.efi /mnt/boot

7. We need to edit /etc/casper.conf inside the initrd (Edit: You don't need to do this; see the end of the post):

   # cd /tmp
   # mkdir i
   # cd i
   # lzcat /cdrom/casper/initrd.lz | cpio -i
   

   now put in /tmp/i/etc/casper.conf (I found out the variables by looking through /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper, which is run by the kernel command line's boot parameter.):

   # This file should go in /etc/casper.conf
   # Supported variables are:
   # USERNAME, USERFULLNAME, HOST, BUILD_SYSTEM, FLAVOUR
   
   export USERNAME="user"
   export USERFULLNAME="Live session user"
   export HOST="vm"
   export BUILD_SYSTEM="Ubuntu"
   
   # USERNAME and HOSTNAME as specified above won't be honoured and will be set to
   # flavour string acquired at boot time, unless you set FLAVOUR to any
   # non-empty string.
   
   export FLAVOUR="Ubuntu"
   
   export PERSISTENT="Yes"
   export root_persistence="overlay"
   

   You can customize your username and host name in this file too. Note root_persistence is the label we specified in step 3. Now compress the initramfs:

   # cd /tmp/i
   # find . | cpio --quiet --dereference -o -H newc | lzma -7 > /mnt/boot/initrd.lz
   

8. Now for a bootloader which uses the above stuff. Install the extlinux package. I grabbed the .deb from the package search.

9. Install extlinux:

   # mkdir /mnt/boot/extlinux
   # extlinux -i /mnt/boot/extlinux
   

   Put this in /mnt/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf:

   DEFAULT linux
   
   LABEL linux
   KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz.efi
   APPEND boot=casper initrd=/boot/initrd.lz noprompt
   

10. The hard disk is probably missing the master boot record code, so write that.

    # dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda
    

11. Unmount /mnt and reboot.

Edit: It turns out you don't need to change initrd.lz.

Instead, all of the options in casper.conf except root_persistence can be sp ecified on the kernel command line - simply add them (without the quotes) to ex tlinux.conf, like this:

APPEND boot=casper initrd=/boot/initrd.lz noprompt username=user hostname=host

You also need to label your hard disk partition casper-rw.