aragonm,
I am afraid that there is no documentation on how to modify live CDs. I
mostly opened up the ISO from the Live CD, added my content and burned the
ISO. This almost always works.
Frankly I see no big difference between having a taylored installable media
with automated installation versus having a diskspace effective backup of a
freshly installed system (e.g. with REAR). Both will (hopefully) result in a
fresh system according your requirements.
I do not know about your use case and have never tried to automate System
installation for Linux but my previous experience with WinXP un-attended CDs
is this: You either spent a loooooot of time to keep your master CD fresh
(new version of drivers / tools, exchange of tools, modification /
optimisation of system settings) or you will soon have a deprecated
installation CD.
Modern Linux distribution (Ubunutu, Trisquel, Linux Mint, etc) make the
installation pretty straight forward. So unless you do tons of changes to the
basic installation, you should be able to set up a fresh system with only a
few mouse clicks (e.g. keyboard settings, hostname, timezone, user &
password). A quick "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade" after the
installation will ensure you have the latest stuff on your system.
A simplistic approach could be a small bash script on a modified Trisquel ISO
which installs the tools you are used to via sudo apt-get install . This bash
script could also do modifications of config files via simple sed command or
copying pre-configured files to the corresponding dirs.
The more complex approach could involve partitioning the drive by a given
scheme via sfdisk:
From the sfdisk man page:
Dump the partitions of a device in a format useful as input to sfdisk. For
example,
% sfdisk -d /dev/hda > hda.out
% sfdisk /dev/hda < hda.out
Mount the new generated partitions in a Live environment and simply rsync or
unpack the full directory structure of your source system over to the newly
generated filesystems.
Trisquel is pretty small. In fact I run a Trisquel installation from a small
16GB USB stick with a lot of stuff installed.
