Customisation
Can you adapt them as needed?
Despite their fairly large collection of apps, these distros don’t include all the repair and rescue tools available. This is partly because some popular rescue tools have licence restrictions which prevent developers from including them in their distros. In any case, instead of lugging around multiple distros to accomplish different tasks, advanced users and technicians will prefer to flesh out their favourite distro to include all the tools they need.
If you’re looking to decompile and assemble your own rescue distro, you won’t get far with ALT Linux Rescue, Morpheusarch or AIO System Rescue Toolkit. None of them offers the option to customise the distro, although you can use their respective package managers to pull in additional utilities and flesh out the live environment as need. In addition, AIO System Rescue Toolkit has a Lite version that is designed to give inexperienced users an opportunity to easily fix their installation.
On the other hand, one of the marquee features of Systemrescuecd is its capability to enable anyone to compile customised versions. There were a bunch of scripts to ease the process of remastering older versions of the distro. That process has now been simplified in the newer Arch-based version, in that it can be simply rebuilt using the sources posted in the project’s Git repository. You will need to have an Arch installation to be able to run Systemrescuecd’s build scripts, which are based on the archiso tool.
UBCD’S customisation is on a par with Systemrescuecd. The project’s website hosts a guide which details the procedure for
extracting the ISO image and then customising the environment, by adding your own floppy and ISO images as well as Freedosbased apps, before compiling a new ISO image. The website documentation also lists the process for updating virus definitions. One particular benefit of UBCD’S customisation mechanism is that since all the modifications are housed within a single folder, you can easily move to a newer version of UBCD without losing any of the changes you’ve made to the distro.