The plan:

I would like to write a script that will install an uncompressed Knoppix system to a CF or even a USB stick of about 4 - 8 Gig (these are quite cheap now). The reason comes down to speed; I need something that runs relatively quick and silent (read - No HD). I am not too sure how much faster an uncompressed version would run but I assume I'll get a bit more speed from it. Also, after it is installed, the automatic HW detection would no longer need to run as all HW drivers and configuration would be saved (installed) on to the CF.

I can not use a "standard" HD install as there are too many writes to the file system for a CF (/var/log, etc.) and there can be no swap file. The final product here is a remastered version of KnoppMyth, a MythTv version of Knoppix which is really cool.

My Questions:

1 - How do I get knoppix installed "uncompressed" but with the unionfs and RAMDisk still working?

2 - I would still like to be able to allocate a portion (partition) of the CF as the users "persistent" home directory.

3 - I would also like to have a script that will allow the use of apt-get or yum to install / update programs on the otherwise RO filesystem. How could I do this?

The "Other" Option:

One other option is to do a remote boot (PXE) of a standard Linux kernel and that actually works really well (and really cool) for a wired network interface but... If the box I am booting is using wireless, that will not work because the MB has no idea how to get to the network. The way around this might be to have a minimal Knoppix kernel on the CF. This kernel would only load up the wireless USB module then mount the rest of the file system over NFS to the "boot server".

If I went with this option I would want to understand how to use the local 1 Gig RAMDrive efficiently. It would obviously run the kernel but with the rest of the files system on the nework how could I use this as a cache?

Any and all ideas and suggestions are welcome and appreciated!

Thanks,
TJ