Okay, this may be common sense knowledge but it was news to me. A couple of the remaster How-To's say once you are setup to add and remove packages you should [of course] run update to get the latest package versions. So I was doing that consistently and always generating a broken KNOPPIX remaster. Most of the time I would get a kernel panic. On those rare occasions it would go to KDE I got 'not enough memory; running something else instead'.

During dselect, two problems I had difficulty with were one, Frozen-bubble-data wouldn't remove, update or install. Always some problem. The second was dependency problems between mount-aes, mount, sysvinit, etc.. I don't know if that was enough to break KNOPPIX or if it was some other package being updated.

This morning with a fresh copy of KNOPPIX in my remaster directory I marked all packages HOLD before doing enything else. Then I ran update. Then I selected aptitude and deborphan to be installed. The gen'ed remaster continues to boot well.

I still have problems removing frozen-bubble when trying to remove all games. So far I have the iso size down to 528mb and it still boots. Even though I still have a long way to go this is the most progress I've made in weeks. I guess I should celebrate or something. Anybody have advice if celebrating too soon will jink up my project? I think I'll just let it sit for a while and get used to what it feels like to be working. Agh, that means now I have to wash dishes.