Geek Joy (Knoppix Remastered)
On Friday I achieved one of the greatest moments of my already very geeky career: I remastered Knoppix. I took the latest version (3.6), unpacked it on my hard drive, added and removed a bunch of packages, and stuffed it back on a CD. It's a little harder than that ... the instructions are here: Knoppix Remastering Howto. You'll need a really good understanding of Linux, and a knowledge of Debian. And 5 gigs of disk space. Of course what I produced is just a very rough draft: there are several extra window managers on the disc, but they don't show up on the menus and neither do any of the other apps I added. But Crack Attack is on the disc and playable (although only in "--low" mode). So I'm hoping to rip it apart and try again in the near future. One of the most fascinating possibilities is that Grub apparently allows you to boot from a loopback file on your hard drive so you can boot to the Knoppix CD image on your HD and make your mods that way. This isn't a simple process and it's kind of tedious, but the pay-off is pretty damn cool and could be very useful.