Creating a custom LiveCD

[John Schofield]

I'm trying to set up a custom installer for my custom hardware.

This is partially a learning project -- I guess I'm doing my own  
version of "Ubuntu From Scratch." {grin}

I want to boot from a Linux CD, and have it get to a command-line,  
and run the following script (unattended):


Partition hard drive (probably using parted)
format partitions as ext3
install basic requirements using debootstrap
copy continued-installation script to / folder on mounted HD.
chroot in to run continued-installation script, which sets up  
networking, grub, etc.
reboot into working system.


I've actually got the installation script working, running from  
another partition on my hard drive. (Except for the partitioning part  
of the script, which I won't be able to do until I'm booting from a cd.)

What I'm having a real hard time with is the custom install CD.

I tried to roll my own using ISOLINUX, but found it fairly poorly  
documented, and wasn't able to get it to boot properly. I don't need  
all the GUI/X-Windows stuff of Knoppix, but I'm currently downloading  
an ISO of that to see if I can get it to run my custom install script  
instead of starting up X.

Anybody have any suggestions? Is there a live CD out there that's  
closer to what I need (just boots into a command-line)?

Can anyone think of a better way to handle the boot-cd portion of  
this? I'm fairly committed to the install-using-debootstrap script  
I've generated, and don't want to move away from that to something  
that just dumps a disk image on the HD, or something like that.

Thanks very much!


John