Mastering the CD

You can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. All that's left is compressing your work, putting it onto a CD, and then final testing.

Begin by compressing the KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX filesystem:

 $ mkisofs -iso-level 4 -R -U -V "Archix" -hide-rr-moved  -cache-inodes -no-bak -pad /home/scott/knoppixuncompressed     | nice -5 create_compressed_fs - 65536 > /home/scott     /knoppixiso/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX 

This command can take a while, depending on the size of the knoppixuncompressed directory and the speed of your machine. When it's finished, it's time (finally!) to create your final burnable or loadable ISO image:

 $ mkisofs -pad -l -r -J -v -V "Archix" -b boot/isolinux/     isolinux.bin -c boot/isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot     -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -hide -rr -moved -o     /home/scott/archix.iso /home/scott/knoppixiso 

Again, this will take quite a while. It will finally finish, and ls -l /home/scott now shows the following:

 -rw-r--r--     1 root     root     653142016 Jun 12 22:55 archix.iso 

Awesome! Only 653MB! Archix is smaller than Knoppix itself, so there's plenty of room to add other software if the distro is ever re-remastered Archix.

There is one thing to fix before continuing. You don't want the ISO in your home directory to be owned by root, so you need to change the permissions (using your own info, of course), and then check it once again with ls -l:

 # chown scott.scott archix.iso # ls -l -rw-r--r--     1 rsgranne     rsgranne     653142016 Jun 12 22:55 archix.iso 

Now you can do whatever you want with your distro: burn it, test it, use it, or delete it and start all over.