heya,

Lots of spare time in the up-coming Christmas holidays, so I thought I'd try my hand at making my own Linux LiveCD from scratch for fun (*not* a Knoppix remaster). Disclaimer: I'm defeinitely not a linux guru, so any help/pointers at all, no matter how basic seeming would be greatly appreciated =).

Firstly, are there any good guides to Knoppix internals, and how it works? Perhaps something similar to the "How Puppy works" guide (link).

Hardware Detection: I know that Knoppix uses RH's Kudzu for this, with it's own hwconfig stuff (sources), but could somebody explain exactly how it's done? Would it be difficult for me to port this to my own liveCD efforts? (Which might be based on a Slack/Gentoo system, not debian - is that a problem?)

USB Memory Sticks: I also noticed that If I insert a usb memory stick after it's booted, Knoppix will automatically detect it, add an fstab entry, mount it, and add a icon to the KDE Desktop. How exactly does it do all of this? What scripts/programs handle this? I looked at the output of dmesg, and the kernel seems to have detected it, but I have no idea how this is done (hotplug?). And what edits the fstab file, and adds the .Desktop icons?

(As a sidenote, when I insert the usb-stick, it's automatically mounted ro, and I have to manually remount it rw as root. Is there a way to have it mount rw automatically).

Window Managers: How does Knoppix handle the starting of different WMs? (i.e., via user boot options such as "knoppix icewm", or "knoppix gnome").

UnionFS: How does Knoppix do this? Which scripts/files should I be specifically looking at?

Ordering Optimisation: Finally, Klaus mentioned something before about how he optimised Knoppix by sorting and ordering files on the CD in a certain way to speed it up - anybody have further information about this?

Thanks,
Victor