I've successfully remastered Knoppix 3.6 but would like a bare system that I can just use on my desktop and make a LiveCD from it as needed.

I have more of a FreeBSD background so naturally when I think of doing this with a Linux system I choose Debian.

I am suspecting I can use bootcd-mkinitrd for this? With bootcd you can copy your system to cd, run it from cd without need for disks and restore the system on disk from bootcd. Also, I believe with the bootcd2disk command it's possible to install a new system from the running CD?

However, I have not used any compressed file system such as cloop before and am not sure how or when to apply it to the creation of the ISO.

Using a compressed file system will not only allow for more data storage on the CD, but more importantly will load and run much faster.

Any fingers pointing in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.