Quote Originally Posted by aay
One downside to this is that if knoppix is uncompressed it will be signicantly slower. It may seem odd to say that compression=faster, but a big bottleneck in the live cd model is the time it takes to read data from your cdrom. Compression actually helps aleviate this problem. Ever try Demo Linux? It was nice but one gripe I had about it was that it was much slower than knoppix. I think part of this was due to the fact that it is not compressed.
Yup, if you have a slow CPU, then uncompressed might be better. But for any moderately fast CPU, compressed should do better.

Uncompressed might be useful though for "experimental" masters where you're tweaking things heavily before recompression. Also, if you burn Knoppix to a DVD instead of a CD, then the higher transfer rate of DVDs will increase the minimum speed of a CPU where compression will help instead of hinder.

Speaking of compression - Would it be possible to use bzip instead of gzip for cloop? That would allow for more files to be fit onto a CD and also speed up access times.