Quote Originally Posted by mzilikazi
Indeed it is far easier to remaster if you can boot it. Plus desktop customizations become possible that are much more difficult if you're using chroot.

I've never tried to use the persistent home feature during a remaster however. I simply do
Code:
mv /home/knoppix /etc/skel
Some other things I've learned......

You can change the default keymep
install-keymap us
dpkg-reconfigure console-common

Change default background:

cp /your/fav/image.jpg /usr/local/lib/knoppix.jpg
Make it the same as your WM background and you have a nice transition
from text mode to desktop.

Debian menus:
update-menus -v

To remove the original KDE menus:
rm -rf /etc/skel/.kde/applnk
rm -rf /usr/share/applnk
(or just go into those directories
and remove all references to KDE apps).
I don't actually use the persistent home for the remaster, it just makes running the 'toHD' install easier...and the toHD install makes a much more convenient backup system than using the CD. The persistent home would still be active after you copied the KNOPPIX file to the toHD install to test it however, unless you modified lilo so that it booted without it. I suppose it could possibly cause some problems since it would be set up for the original KNOPPIX filesystem.

I tried your method for saving /home/knoppix, I had actually included the code in my remaster.clean script at one point:
Code:
  mv /home/knoppix /etc/skel  
  touch /home/knoppix  
  chown knoppix:knoppix /home/knoppix  
  chown -R root:root /etc/skel
but something went wrong & I was left with an empty /home/knoppix & an empty /etc/skel! I think it was unable to write to /etc/skel so it removed /home/knoppix as step 1 of the mv but couldn't write it so it just reported an error & lost it. Then dumb me fixed whatever reason it couldn't do the write & tried it again....this time it worked but now /home/knoppix was empty so it wiped out /etc/skel as well.
That was my last remaster effort with knx3.3...I then tried apt-get upgrade which pretty much slaughtered the system so I started working on 3.4 instead.
I've just tried the cleanup script & a remaster with 3.4, there were some errors is the cleanup script but making the compressed fs did not go well...it ended up 1.1Gig, overfilled the target partition & crashed with 'fatal: could not load /lib/mopdules/2.6.6/modules.dep-no such file' error when I tried to run it. Not sure why, the remaster was downsized from Knoppix original & should have ened up about 550Meg. I don't think anything has changed in the create compressed file system step from knx3.3 to knx3.4. Or has it?

The background menus is a nice tip, I will include it in the final HOWTO. I don't want to include the kde menus info because I use KDE but should include something about removing uneeded /home/knoppix/.hidden-setup-files. There should be more documentation about .desktop & other setup files & how they work but I'm not knowledgable enough to write it.

Can you enlighten me about sorting prior the making the compressed fs? Is it necessary? or desirable?
I see you were using:
Code:
ls -U /build/KNOPPIX 
boot.img KNOPPIX 
cd /build
what is this doing? (probably it is now a moot point as 3.4 does not use boot.img).

Thanks