Ubuntu derivatives : howto ?

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hello,

I am interested in building a Warty derivative. However, I'm unable to
find any good documentation about this process. Could someone guide me
through the process of building a Warty CD with a modified installer and
a custom list of packages ? If somebody can help me, I'm willing to then
throughoutly document the whole process (so the helping part would
mostly be a one-time job).

My main question is : what do I need to do to build a custom ISO with :
- Debian's partman instead of Ubuntu's
- A custom list of packages
- a /etc/apt/sources.list modified to include universe and multiverse by
  default.

However, as a first step, and to get a better understanding of the build
process, I'd be happy with how to regenerate the warty ISO.

Why do I need this ? I'm member of a student union	which lend CDs to
other students (to-be computer engineers). We mainly lend Mandrake and
endure the consequences of this every week, because Ubuntu is not at all
suited for our needs :

- Warty's installer can't resize Windows partitions during installation.
  100% of our "customers" need to resize a Windows partition before
  installing. And asking them to use third-party software (Knoppix,
  Partition Magic) is not acceptable : they are mostly computer newbies,
  and installing GNU/Linux is already a big enough challenge.

- Students have special needs (like, for example, an Ada compiler,
  scilab, etc, etc, etc). So we need to remove/add some packages.
  Asking them to download the packages from the internet is not an
  option, since most of them don't have an internet connection at home
  (they are newcomers in the city for the most part).

Apart from that, Ubuntu is really fabulous, and students who installed
it (mainly those with an internet connection) are totally happy with it.
So I'd kill to be able to distribute Ubuntu to more students inside the
school. But we need a derivate for this to happen.

Thank you
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
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