Note: You can download the latest Rescuezilla ISO image here. This page is intended for developers.
A single make deb command generates a Rescuezilla package ready for installation.
Alternatively, a single make all command can generate an AMD64 ISO image and an i386 image, which are complete Ubuntu-based Linux live environments capable of booting from USB sticks, CD, DVD and any EFI firmware, including with EFI Secure Boot switched on.
To construct such an ISO image, an Ubuntu 18.04, or similar Ubuntu-package environment capable of running debootstrap, chroot and bind mounts is currently required. However, it's currently recommended only Ubuntu 18.04 (Focal) be used to build the ISO image: older debootstrap versions may not have the scripts to bootstrap an Ubuntu 20.04 Focal package environment, and versions of debootstrap newer than v1.0.106 (2018-07-05) currently don't work due to the reasons described in #72. Finally, Debian and other non-Canonical package environments will not work (see the "EFI Secure Boot" section below). To build on environments other than Ubuntu 18.04, see the "Build ISO with docker" section below.
sudo apt-get update
# The AMD64 version of Rescuezilla is based on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal, so you may find you need a more
# recent version of debootstrap (from the backports repository) to bootstrap a Focal environment.
sudo apt-get install git-lfs git make sudo \
rsync debootstrap gettext squashfs-tools dosfstools mtools xorriso \
memtest86+ devscripts debhelper \
# GRUB bootloader and support modules for booting both MBR and EFI boot
# across CPU architectures. Notably the AMD64 image *legacy boot* uses
# the same 32-bit bootloader as the i386 image.
grub-efi-amd64-bin grub-efi-ia32-bin grub-pc-bin \
# For Secure Boot, the GRUB binaries need to trust Canonical
# signatures, not Debian signatures, as GRUB needs to verify the
# Canonical-signed Linux kernel (see "EFI Secure Boot" section below).
shim-signed grub-efi-amd64-signed \
# To provide backwards compatibility of Redo Backup v1.0.4 backups on
# AMD64 systems, install the dependencies required to build some very
# old versions of "sfdisk" and "partclone.restore". More recent
# versions of sfdisk and partclone are used for all other operations.
libtool-bin gawk pkg-config comerr-dev docbook-xsl e2fslibs-dev fuse \
libaal-dev libblkid-dev libbsd-dev libext2fs-dev libncurses5-dev \
libncursesw5-dev libntfs-3g88 libreadline-gplv2-dev libreadline5 \
libreiser4-dev libtinfo-dev libxslt1.1 nilfs-tools ntfs-3g ntfs-3g-dev \
quilt sgml-base uuid-dev vmfs-tools xfslibs-dev xfsprogs xml-core \
xsltproc
git lfs clone https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla
cd rescuezilla/
git submodule init
# Download 'partclone' and 'util-linux' submodules
git submodule update --recursive
# Optional: Build only the standalone deb packages without bothering with the live environment
make deb
# Build the amd64 ISO image, the i386 ISO image, and the deb files.
# This should work on Ubuntu or Ubuntu-derived distributions, but is _not_ recommended
# Debian or Debian-derived environments (see "EFI Secure Boot" section below).
#
# sudo privileges required for the chroot bind mount
sudo make amd64 i386
# Test the generated ISO image in a virtual machine. (see suggested workflow section below)
sudo apt-get install virtualboxAn optional Dockerfile is provided to generate a consistent build environment on a much larger variety of operating systems. The Dockerfile is managed under version-control just like the source code, which means the ideal build environment is always available, even when building very old commits. Official releases are built using this approach. See .travis.yml for docker build instructions.
To be used effectively in development, Docker has a relatively steep learning curve. If you prefer to avoid docker entirely, stick to the 'Build without docker' instructions.
Rescuezilla ISO image provides an Ubuntu-based live environment, so for Secure Boot to work the ISO image build environment currently needs the host system to contain a Canonical Ubuntu package environment. Debian and other non Ubuntu-package environments will not construct an ISO image that boots with Secure Boot, because Debian's package repositories contain different versions of key bootloader packages which happen to only trust Debian certificates, namely the Debian-signed GRUB bootloader (grub-efi-amd64-signed) which is launched by the Microsoft-signed EFI shim (shim-signed). This means that when Secure Boot is enabled, an EFI boot will fail to authenticate Rescuezilla's Canonical-signed kernel images leaving the developer in GRUB Rescue Mode. The "Build with docker" instructions on this page provides developers who use any distribution which does not use Canonical's Ubuntu packages (such as Debian) a pathway to generating an image that works with Secure Boot by first constructing the ideal Ubuntu-based build environment. The requirement for a host machine package environment to contain Canonical's Ubuntu packages will be removed with task #59.
The build script caches the debootstrap packages, apt-get packages and apt-get indexes. The first build may download hundreds of megabytes of deb packages, but subsequent builds don't need to download the same files again. Even with cached deb packages, doing a from-scratch extract and install of deb files still takes minutes (even on modern computers).
Contributions to Rescuezilla frontend applications can of course be done without building an ISO image at all: the most efficient way is to just build the deb package with make deb. For many other contributions, the typical developer may prefer to first build an ISO image using the standard instructions (above), then boot the ISO image in a virtual machine, and then make any proposed changes inside its (non-persistent) filesystem. Once satisfied of a proposed change, any files that have been modified can be exported from the virtual machine (using say, scp), and committed into codebase. When all changes have been committed, use the build scripts to generate a new ISO image, and test/debug until satisfied.
The most efficient workflow really depends on the feature you are trying to add. You may wish to construct a VirtualBox environment for a convenient sandbox for testing ISO images.
To non-developers: You can download the latest Rescuezilla ISO image here. This page is intended for developers.