It’s time again for techie talk. Yes, this is because I was unable to easily locate this information using Google, so doing some digging of my own lead to this discovery.

If you’re creating your own custom LiveCD for Ubuntu (we’re doing this at my FTJ in order to allow customers to boot a LiveCD with a demo/training version of our product right from a CD), you’ll probably want to get rid of that annoying ‘Install’ icon that sits on the default user’s (”ubuntu”) desktop. Deleting it from the desktop and saving that configuration aside doesn’t get rid of it. Instead, you need to alter some scripts.

First, if you’re following the Ubuntu LiveCD customization wiki page instructions, you’ll have an ‘edit’ directory with the contents of the CD available for editing. Comment out lines 49-54 in the file ‘edit/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper-bottom/10adduser’ that read:

for file in /usr/share/applications/ubiquity-gtkui.desktop /usr/share/applications/kde/ubiquity-kdeui.desktop; do
    if [ -f "/root/$file" ]; then
        chroot /root install -D -o $USERNAME -g $USERNAME $file /home/$USERNAME/Desktop/$(basename "$file")
        break
    fi
done

You will then need to ‘chroot’ back into the ‘edit’ directory and remake initrd:

mkinitramfs -o /initrd.gz 2.6.15-23-386

Replace the final arg in that line with the applicable kernel version (look in /lib/modules).

Exit from the chroot jail and move this file to extract-cd/casper:

mv edit/initrd.gz extract-cd/casper/

Continue with the rest of the instructions on that wiki page. Done! Hope this helps someone.