UKIfy-ubuntu

The config files generate an Ubuntu noble Xfce4 desktop efi that you can boot a live system off.

This uses your system RAM as the filesystem storage thanks to systemd.volatile=overlay. No external drives or USB is required to boot into the live system.

Even though it is possible to directly boot the generated EFI image from UEFI.

Requirements:

• Mkosi
• Systemd-boot
• An EFI boot partition with at least ~600MB free.
• 8GB RAM or more. Much lower if you want a headless live system.

Get started

testing with qemu

In mkosi.conf comment out virtio under KernelModulesInclude= and do the same in mkosi.conf.d/ubuntu.conf

[Runtime]
RAM=8G
Console=gui # need qemu-desktop

then mkosi -f qemu

build final USI image

mkosi -f --image-version=$(date --utc +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)

boot the EFI binary

copy the generated efi to /boot/EFI/Linux and select it (labeled Ubuntu 24.04) as a boot option in systemd-boot.

That's it!

Note on USI image size

[Output]
Format=uki
CompressLevel=17
CompressOutput=zstd

ZSTD compression level of 17 brings the efi image size to 528MB which is reasonably compact for a ~1.7GB filesystem size (check screenshots folder).

Higher compression levels can lead to even smaller efi binaries at the cost of taking more time to decompress and load the initial initramfs on boot.