[Now the flattery is out of the way] what I’m trying to do is create a bootable image of a preinstalled system to put on a USB key. I have an image of the filesystem that I have created (my perfect build – a Xubuntu 8.10 install with a couple of things removed and a couple of things added) and just want to make that bootable – I used the UCK to unpack the Xubuntu 8.10 live cd and tried just swapping out the rootfs from the cd, with the rootfs from my perfect build (I’ll deal with the initrd menu stuff later), then tried repacking it (OK, so I was being a bit hopeful) – and it failed with ‘Cannot update filesystem.manifest, error=126′.

I do understand that I’m not using the UCK in entirely the right way (repositories and debs) but can you tell me why this didn’t work – as far as I understand there are 2 things at play here – a squashed filesystem you want to boot into, and initrd which boots you into that squashed filesystem, and I don’t really see why as long as initrd is calling the squashed filesystem it shouldn’t be able to be any filesystem you like (within limits). The file system I’m replacing the 8.10 liveCD FS with is just an installed 8.10, so shouldn’t be markedly different, should it?

I hope I’ve made the problem clear, and any advice you could give would help me hugely. thanks