I've been tinkering w/ creating customized Knoppix images and have been pleased w/ the results. I've successfully created bootable custom CD's and thumbdrives. My real goal however is to create larger custom distributions (3-4 GB expected total filesystem size) that I will deploy on large capacity thumbdrives or DVDs. Here's the question:

Is it required that I use a compressed filesystem? I find that the compression process on my hardware takes 45 minutes to an hour or longer (depending on how large it is and which machine is handling the compression process) and this creates a somewhat painful development loop to test minor changes. One thought I had was to just use a compression level that was not very aggressive but I don't see any options for that on the man page for create_compressed_fs.

Any experience or suggestions on this? All of the HOWTO's I've found don't address this point.

Assuming this can be done (that is, that I can use a non-compressed filesystem) -- are there any reasons that I wouldn't want to do this?

Thanks!

-Andy