Hi-
I'm in a bit of a unique situation. Allow me to explain. I've got hundreds of these linux boxes i have to make for some really odd human genome stuff for colleges around the united states. We decided to used linux for everything for two reasons: 1, stability. 2, price. We are making over 1000 of these boxes over a 5 year period. The basic hardware setup uses as laptop HD, a cd burner, and a mini-itx motherboard from VIA. Here is my delima. I have to get the exact same software settings on each linux box. But there probbably wont be more than 5 boxes with the exact same hardware. The company I'm working for is pretty much buying parts from internet vendors 10 at a time to build these things. I thought about making an exact copy of the HD and burning it to multiple CDs and then copying it back onto each HD to boot all the software settings and what not, but that won't work if the hardware changes or the HD size changes. Can Knoppix do the following

1. boot directly from cd onto hd with little/no user input (i dont have time to select stuff when i'm building 10 of these at once cause i'll mess one little thing up)
2. can auto detect and setup most major hardware, i'm not using anything special
3. can setup printers automatically (not a requirement but sure would be nice)
4. I need it to auto install some tarballs of custom software i have developed and be able to write a WHOLE bunch of files to different directories
5. Edit user settings on the first boot

Can Knoppix do all of this (or even come close). And, if it can, how do i go about doing all of this? I've read the remastering guide on this website and I don't understand half of it. If anyone could help me out with creating the CD I'd really appreciate it.

Something else to consider: When these things are in the field there REALLY needs to be a recovery cd that erases the HD and boots everything from scratch that works the first time.

Thanks!