Wasta-Remastersys is the tool we use to create Wasta-Linux ISOs and that you can use to make your own Wasta-Linux derivative ISOs that include your own package additions, locale settings, keyboards, default wallpaper, etc. Read more on it here.
One longstanding item on my “wish list” for Wasta-Remastersys has been to try and find out if it would be possible for it to make ISOs larger than 4GB in size. The main reason for this limitation is that in days gone by the ISO needed to be burnable to a DVD. The unintended side effect, however, was that it was quite limiting what could be included on the custom ISO before that 4GB limit was exceeded.
Well, no more! I was able to do some testing and reading on competing tools to make ISOs and integrate the cdrtools version of mkisofs into Wasta-Remastersys. Don’t worry about those details, what you need to know is that this version supports ISOs greater than 4GB in size. I worked with a few African IT friends in Kenya last week to do just that, and the resulting ISOs had no problem being used to install. Do remember that ISOs greater than 4GB in size won’t be able to be burned to a DVD.
In one case, we made a “mega ISO” for my Cameroonian friend (hello Ezob 
that supports many users in a “nearly always offline” context. We included all of this on the ISO: PT 8, PT 9, PT Lite (alpha / beta), Fieldworks, all AppBuilders, Adaptit, Zoom, Chrome, Brave, Telegram, Cameroon keyboards, French keyboards and locale, Kiwix (offline reader for Wikipedia, etc - we did NOT bundle the French and English Wikipedia .zim files but we could have I suppose if we wanted a 50GB ISO :-), among others I think I have already forgotten. All of this is in addition to the default Wasta-Linux ISO which had Bloom already, another need for Ezob. The resulting ISO was 8.6GB in size.
The other custom ISO we made last week was with another friend from Burkina Faso (hello Zida who has established a “Free Software Community for Education in Burkina Faso” organization. One customization we did was to make sure to put his community’s logo as the default wallpaper for branding promotion I need to still work through how he could change the “boot splash logo”, it is on my “to do” list.
Looking ahead I could finally consider making a more universal “Wasta-Linux LT ISO” with all available SIL tools pre-installed: the holdup has always been the 4GB ISO size. So let me know of your interest in that. Of course it will be a larger download, but there could be several scenarios where the tools all bundled in a Wasta-Linux ISO make sense.
Additionally, let us know if you will be making your own ISO or even if you are rolling out standard Wasta-Linux ISO installs to new users: it is encouraging to continually be surprised by where Wasta-Linux and Linux in general show up. New to me this past week were reports from multiple places using it that I didn’t know about it before including Mali. This means there is contiguous representation of Wasta-Linux all across the Sahel from Mali to Ethiopia (yes, not many installs in some of those places, but potential for growth is nearly limitless
Greetings from Ethiopia,
Rik