Notes on floppyfw for CD:

1. The ISO image is meant to be written to the CD raw, using cdrecord or
equivalent on other platforms.  If you want to test with CD-RW, remember
that most old CD-ROM drives cannot read CD-RW.

2. To customise there are two ways:

a. The init file will try to mount and read config files from floppy
which will override the same file on the CD. So modify the files on a
floppyfw floppy and have this floppy in the drive when it boots. The
config files that can be modified are the same as for the floppy based
version. In addition any .bz2 packages in floppyfw, modules, or packages
will be unpacked, and any pre and post scripts in packages executed.
If you don't intend to load extra packages, make sure they are not on
the floppy, i.e. do not use an existing floppyfw floppy, just have the
config files in the same places as a floppyfw floppy.

b. You can extract the initrd.gz from the CD and modify that. To do this
you need a Linux system. Copy the directory hierarchy on the CD to a
working directory. gunzip initrd.gz, then mount -o rw,loop initrd
/some/mount/point. You can then edit the files in the initrd. When you
are done, umount initrd, then gzip -9 initrd. Then follow the mkisofs
instruction in isolinux.doc in a recent isolinux distribution (I used
syslinux-1.64) to make a ISO image. Burn it to CD.

One thing you can do with all the unused space on the CD is to put
useful programs on it before you do the mkisofs. Then you can mount the
CD from floppyfw and use it. Naturally the kernel you install must have
the ability to mount an ISO9660 filesystem. For booting, the ability to
mount is not required since it's the BIOS and isolinux.bin that load the
kernel and initrd.

2001-12-12