I have been working a fair bit lately with Morphix. It's a pretty cool modular Linux distribution based off of knoppix.

Morphix is based on debian unstable (and knoppix). It's pretty neat how you can make modules to have the packages you need and config files you want to include. Very handy for making live cd distributions that just do a limited number of things.

Morphix uses syslinux to boot up with a limited ramdisk (it's a 2.88mb floppy image).

Once thats up, it loads the main morphix module. The main module just has hardware detection, the kernel, and general setup scripts. It's in a compressed loop filesystem, which means that it's about 32MB on the cd, and expands to about 80-90MB.

After the main morphix stuff is loaded, it looks for "main" modules in a mainmod/ subdirectory. Each one is in turn unpacked and run. In here is the main distro packages you need. You can also have debs in a debs/ directory and it will unpack them and install them.

The mini modules are then loaded. They are very small, and typically contain config files, small packages and scripts.

If you have any need to make your own customized Live CD distribution, take a look at morphix.
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