What's a good distro to make a custom Live CD out of?

I want to make a Live CD / USB drive that I can use to
make a whole bunch of computers into (temporary)
icecream (icecc) nodes. I don't really need X or the
like, but a recent kernel, recent gcc etc and a wide
variety of hardware support is good; I have had
problems in the past with live CDs not working with
stuff like network interface, which ruins the point
of a distributed compiler. It would also be neat if it
was small enough ( <~150MB? ) to affordably load
the entire thing into ram and not need the disk
after that so one could use a single USB drive to
load it onto an entire computer lab and not have to
burn a billion CDs. And obviously I'd like to do the
least work possible.

Henry de Valence

P.S.: Sorry if I screwed something up; it's my first time
using usenet and I'm posting from Google Groups
instead of a real client because I can't figure out which

hdevalence wrote:
> I want to make a Live CD / USB drive that I can use to
> make a whole bunch of computers into (temporary)
> icecream (icecc) nodes. I don't really need X or the
> like, but a recent kernel, recent gcc etc and a wide
> variety of hardware support is good; I have had
> problems in the past with live CDs not working with
> stuff like network interface, which ruins the point
> of a distributed compiler. It would also be neat if it
> was small enough ( <~150MB? ) to affordably load
> the entire thing into ram and not need the disk
> after that so one could use a single USB drive to
> load it onto an entire computer lab and not have to
> burn a billion CDs. And obviously I'd like to do the
> least work possible.
> 
> Henry de Valence
> 
> P.S.: Sorry if I screwed something up; it's my first time
> using usenet and I'm posting from Google Groups
> instead of a real client because I can't figure out which
> one to use / how to configure it.

On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 05:55:07 -0800, hdevalence wrote:

> I want to make a Live CD / USB drive that I can use to make a whole
> bunch of computers into (temporary) icecream (icecc) nodes. I don't
> really need X or the like, but a recent kernel, recent gcc etc and a
> wide variety of hardware support is good; I have had problems in the
> past with live CDs not working with stuff like network interface, which
> ruins the point of a distributed compiler. It would also be neat if it
> was small enough ( <~150MB? ) to affordably load the entire thing into
> ram and not need the disk after that so one could use a single USB drive
> to load it onto an entire computer lab and not have to burn a billion
> CDs. And obviously I'd like to do the least work possible.
> 
> Henry de Valence
> 
> P.S.: Sorry if I screwed something up; it's my first time using usenet
> and I'm posting from Google Groups instead of a real client because I
> can't figure out which one to use / how to configure it.

 check SlaX:
http://slax.org/

 as from version 5 to 6 the site is under heavy remake/remodel
you may like to see the other side of the site to read a bit
more:
http://blog.slax.org/

 in short, that's one of the best ever small sized LiveCD/USB
installations you will find. There used to be a page on the site
on how to build your own live distro and the author even published
very interesting scripts but it seems to be under work...

 Meanwhile you could just DL the 190MB (2/3ds of this size are
to include X and a lot of X related stuff) and see if it satisfies
your needs in soft and hardware :-)

-- 
have space suit : "VMSBUX:B0N1@GOHH.GO"