I'm thinking of making a cut-down linux box to use for internet sharing, file sharing, firewall etc together with a friend. It'll probably be based on a minimalist installation of some distro with some extra software installed on top.
If our project turns out good I've got some friends who'd like a box like that too. Is there some way I can make a bootable CD of our custom distro installation to install identical copies on other machines?
I guess I could handle making a script to do the actual installing but I still need something to partition the harddrive, detect hardware and make a basic filing system.

Also, this box should be able to run without keyboard, mouse or monitor but many PC motherboards won't boot if no keyboard is plugged in. Is there some way to turn this off?

Cheers!
-James

If you're going to use only packages from this didstribution,nearly allo of them offer a possibility to create a floppy (or file) with all data needed for replication. For details, read the distros's documentation.
For server installation it should be enough. If you intend to use extra software, it becomes much more complicated. I don't know an easy method.
There is a possibility to boot all machines without keyboards. It requires a small device (I don't know the details, but I know it's very simple) plugged into keyboard's place. I think it should be described somewhere in the Net.

Sounds good. I guess if we need any extra software that won't be a problem - once we have a basic working linux on the machine we can put in a second CD with the extras and run a script to install it or something like that.