Has anyone played with LiveCD? Can the F8 LiveCD be modifed, I'm looking for anyone who may have an understanding of this. I've tried to add a plugin or two, but can't get it to boot afterwards. Any help would be great.

LiveCDs usually use part of your system memory (a RAM disk) to create writable parts of the filesystem. Typically the /home area is held in a RAM disk, and a few other places like /tmp. When a LiveCD uses RAM in this way it is volatile - i.e. it will be reset when the machine is rebooted.

The actual CD is not modified. Sometimes a LiveCD may be configured to allow a user to save settings to a USB key or a file on a hard disk. This has the advantage over a RAM disk that it is non-volatile - user settings will persist after a reboot.

More recently a few LiveCDs have been using a thing called UnionFS to allow the illusion of updating files on the CD itself, although again, this needs some external storage medium. AFAIK, this is still not very common.

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but instead of using a LiveCD, you might want to consider using a LiveUSB. I got a 1GB USB stick recently for a friend who needed a good compiler+dev environment and was stuck with a Vista laptop.
I installed Slax on it. Since its on a USB instead of a CD ROM, any changes you make are compressed and saved to it, and reappear again on the next boot. (I put a randomly changing set of wallpapers, customised keybindings in KDE, and added packages like abiword, emacs and gcc). Slax is good fun!

I haven't tried it myself, but this could be what you're looking for:

http://littlesvr.ca/isomaster/

Hey, thanks for the input, as it's more than I've gotten Let me be a little more descriptive in what I am doing, or trying to do. I have search quite a bit for info... and there is not much to have as of yet. Here is what I've done so far:

I have built a USB key with F8 LiveCD and it works pretty good. The LiveCd is nice, but there is no java support or, in my case, support for a small thin client plugin(preconfigured) that I need. Instead of having to load this plugin each time, I want to take and modify the LiveCD (not a total remix I guess) and add java and this plugin.

In case you have not dissected the LiveCD, it contains a squashfs filesystem called squashfs.img. Inside that is another squashfs filesystem called ext3fs.img. You can mount each, mount -o loop blah blah, and gain read only access to these file systems.

What I have so far... I have mounted the USB and copied off the squashfs.img and the mounted and copied ext3fs.img from there. I then mounted that, and copied the file system to a directory. I have tried JUST adding a directory just to see if it can be saved and viewed. Then I ran mksquashfs <directory> ext3fs.img and then did the same again, mksquashfs ext3fs.img squashfs.img. When mounted, these look just like the original BUT Since it changes the image, during the boot process I get the following:

VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev dm-0

So, to try to narrow down the part that was failing, I copied the original ext3fs.img to my HDD and the the homemade one back and verified it failed. Then I copied the original one back to the USB key, tried to boot, and it booted. So I have come to the conclusion its has to do with something that I am doing wrong, or omitting, to build a new image with squashfs.

So if anyone has tried any of this, or knows so gotchas, give me a yell. I'm still working with it.

I have done this and it works BUT the LiveCD will detect and configure a display where as I have not figured how to get this setup to do the same. I would go this route if I could get the components to detect and confgure during boot like the LiveCd does...