Mr. Mizzens Respin Guide !

Download the manual and scripts here:
http://www.imperial-command.net/Respin-How-To-V1.tar.gz

The ever requested Fedora, Red Hat, CentOS Respin / Remaster how to by the (in)famous Mr. Mizzen!
This is an early draft version, and not very polished, but it is usable. Recently tested on CentOS 5.2
This should remain valid until RHEL 6.0 arrives.
I am working with Ubuntu / Debian now, so there is no plan to update this until RHEL 6.
Included in the file:
Cleanup Comps how to.
Sample scripts.
Respin How To guide.

As always, Please Read "The Friendly Manual".
From Programing 101 you should know enough to modify only one thing at a time, then test.
For those of you that grab the script, edit comps, add updates, third party files then -let er rip- are asking for trouble.
Although it is not difficult to customize and respin, please take it one step at a time.

So, Hold on to your hats, because this ain't for those with heart or back conditions or those who think they might be pregnant. This must be run from root!
------- Karsten Hahn ------

What about Pungi?
(Sounds like a disease or fungus, doesn't it?)
If you can use Pungi, the software, not the musical instrument played with the nose by snake charmers, then Pungi might be the easier tool to use.

The first limitation is that it only works on Fedora 7 and above.
It will not work with older versions of Fedora and (recently) will not work with Red Hat EL / CentOS 5.
Will it work with the next version of RHEL? No one has said.. so, wait and see.

I have not worked with Pungi for a while, but one of the limitation I did notice was the lack of a way to manipulate the comps.xml file. This is the file that gives you the menu selections at install time.
When you "Roll your own" with my script, you do have the chance to preselect or deselect any packages in the file you want.
For me, I think this is an important consideration. At the very least it saves a lot of time at install previewing every choice so that you do not add extra garbage you don't want and of course you don't skip important packages you need.

Beyond that, I also did not see any way to add extra non-installation files to the respin.
This is just a little touch that I added to my respins. For mine, I include a Post-Install? directory that contains all my special post install files. RPMs that do not install well with Anaconda, Video drivers, JAVA runtime, wall papers, desktop themes etc. My post install tree is almost 1 GB.
I find this very handy to have on the disk. After installation, I just reinsert the DVD, copy the tree to disk and all of the other files I need to complete my install are there.