On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 09:41 -0600, Brian Kelsay wrote:
And then there is the old standby of remastering your own Knoppix: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8081 there are other articles on this. Google "knoppix remaster howto" or substitute in your LiveCD distro you want to start with.
"Remastering" is nothing more than process of extracting the ISO, modifying it, and re-compressing it. It can be done with any Live CD including Debian Live. Most of the instructions you will find using Brian's Google query are generic enough to use anywhere.
However, there is a better way.
The beauty of Debian Live is that off-the-shelf packages do not need any specialization to work with the ramdisk environment. In the Knoppix world, they take Debian packages and heavily modify their /etc/init.d scripts to come up with the KNOPPIX boot sequence - this includes fundamental changes to the standard hardware detection stuff done in a regular Linux distro. In the Debian Live case, we mount a normal Debian root filesystem image, modify it to be "live" in RAM, and then hand control off to the normal /new_root/sbin/init and it boots as though it's running from a hard disk as it normally would. This means that almost no effort is required to get any software in the Debian repositories (57,000+ packages) to work in the Live environment.
And that's to say nothing of the benefit of having a good, clean rootfs directory built from the latest repositories to begin with; no need to go through a decompression process.