hello all. I have gone through the remastering knoppix howto manual. the manual spoke of every thing but my requirement. I want to make a customised knoppix distro that can run from a 256 mb pen drive. as I had emailed before, my talking book reader needs that. JTD, Thanks for the link for the manual. the reason I did not ask any questions for a long time is because I was confirming that I am rest ashured that my problem is unsolved in the manual before asking uselessly on this list and crowding the trafic. but alas it is indeed unsolved. I believe I will format my pen drive with ext3 or riserfs file system. mostly I will go with ext3. now my question is how do I get knoppix to boot from my pen drive. no, I don't want dam small linux or any pre customised distro. correct me if I am wrong, butdam small linux or any other custom distro will contain gnome/ KDE, office productivity, and other things which I don't need. all I need here is a simple distro with no gui. the list of requirement is as follows. 1. bash and related tools. 2. standard c libraries so that my custom c programs can run. 3. festival speach synthesizer. 4. scanning and OCR softwares. I may just choose to have the libraries without the gui interface. and if there are console based OCR softwares, nothing like it. 5. grub boot loder (I think that must be obvious, sorry to sound stupid.). 6. a menu driven program that will start instead of the bash prompt after the system auto login. I don't want user to enter any username or password. 7. python interpreter I believe with the above requirement, I think 256 mb is more than sufficient. I have seen knoppix distros of about 200 mb with gui and other stuff (except open office of course). and yes, I have mentioned before that my pen drive has booted once with a custom slackware distro. so no problems booting gnu/linux from my pen drive. the only problem I am stuck with is that I can't find a way to get the only the above mentioned apps and create a custom distro that will boot from my pen drive with ext3 file system. I want to have it come up with my menu driven application instead of the default bash prompt. can any one help out in getting this work exactly as I want? thanks and regards. Krishnakant.