I think that Knoppix is a top notch distro, Klaus has done the Linux community a wonderful favor by making it possible. I have DL'd most every Knoppix edition since I don't know when.

I have been messing around with the idea of moving my small home server to knoppix for a while now - just never had the where-with-all to do the remaster. I wanted a pretty basic system, IMAP, web server (for internal pages), DNS relay, DHCP and a proxy server. I wanted it on a CDROM so it couldn't get hosed. Too many times a crappy IDE HD has corrupted my system after running for a few months straight. With a CD based OS I could make multiple copies for safety and only worry about backing up the data.

I had a bit of a struggle with the concepts of the Knoppix remaster. I fought with getting X to start in the chroot'd environment using xnest. I hacked away to get services and packages straightened out. After a few false starts I was making good headway on it when I read a blurb about mklivecd [ http://www.linuxminicd.org/mklivecd/ ] here on the Knoppix board. Hmmm, I wanted to give this a try.

Using Vmware I installed the distro that I wanted to be my base (Mandrake 9.2) and then installed it again on a second (in the case of vmware - virtual) drive so that I had a base system with everything and a very limited "test" system with just the basics. I tweaked and removed as much as possible from the 'test" system then added what I wanted. In just a few days of picking around at it in my spare time I had exactly what I wanted. I rebooted to the "base" Mandrake and ran mklivecd - telling it the root was the second disk with the "test" system on it. I did it this way with the "base" system so that I could add a few apps from source on the base system (with stuff like kernel sources installed) using checkinstall and install the resultant RPM on the "test" system.

It ran. It ran well and had everything I wanted on it. It was so much easier to do it this way; build a disk based distro the way I wanted and then mklivecd it then remastering Knoppix.

Again, I love Knoppix. The way it performs and what it does is abolutely astounding.

Has anyone else played with mklivecd yet?