Graphical customization

JLiveCD itself is all command line, but it allows GUI tools to be run in chroot. Thus you can run any tool you want and do whatever you want with them.

By default, all of the configs are generated for the root account, but it's highly recommended that you use a standard user account. You can create one fairly easily and delete it after you are done with it.

Create standard user account

adduser user
adduser user sudo

Now change to this user:

sudo -u user -i

Now all the configuration should be done within this account. You should backup those configuration files and delete this account before exiting chroot (if you do not wish to have dedicated user account on live session).

Changing configuration of a software

1. Run the software in chroot with the appropriate command (if it's GUI then its GUI will launch). If GUI does not launch, you can try gksu dbus-run-session <command> see this comment for details.
2. Change the configuration like you usually do, then save the configuration files (usually inside ~/.config aka edit/home/user/.config folder) to another folder (you can use edit/mydir).
3. edit/etc/skel is your actual home directory. Whatever you put here will end up in your live session home directory and any home directory that will be created for any user. So copy your configurations (.config or others) into this directory.

Changing desktop settings

Run the individual program one by one and change their configs. For example, running xfce4-settings-manager will open the settings manager window, which you can use to change all kinds of settings that are available.

For xfce the greatest program to run in this case is the xfce4-panel. It starts up the panel where you get everything else: all settings apps and tools including plugins and applets etc..

After you are done, backup the settings (usually from .config folder)

Apply the settings

To apply the settings, all you need to do is copy them in the edit/etc/skel, it's your live session /home/user directory.

Delete the standard user account

To delete the account created before, run

deluser user

It will probably fail due to some existing process. The process id should be printed on terminal. kill that process id:

kill process-id

Keep killing those until deluser user succeeds.

It's safe to exit the chroot now.