Some colleagues and I (all of us Linux newbies), are currently involved in a non-profit project which involves rebuilding donated computer systems, to be given to underprivileged members of society.

In order to avoid licensing hassles with Wholly Incredibly Nasty Dreary Old Wasteful Systems, we decided to use and install a Linux OS. After much experimentation with the available distros we finally settled on a Slackware based OS.

We have reconfigured the distro with the latest packages and kernel, installed Bootsplash screens, a KDE front end, HAL and Udev, wheel mice and so on, in order to make it as attractive and user friendly as possible - bearing in mind that most of the people receiving the computers will be novice users.

We have spent much time tweaking the system so that everything works really, really well.
We have configured it with a single very attractive user account, along with the root account.

We now wish to take this HDD installation, with all of the account details, desktop settings, modifications and tweaks, and turn it into an installable CD that we can use on a variety of hardware.

Our problem, (remember we're newbies) is that we are unsure of exactly how to do this.
Information available on the web is conflicting at best, or does not address what we are trying to do.

How do you convert this installed operating system into an installation CD, whilst retaining all of these pre-configured settings, so that 'tweaking' the new computers is extremely minimal or not necessary?

Would the account settings, desktops etc have to be saved into a special file that could be injected into our customised slackware install CD?

Has anyone done this? Is there a step-by-step guide that anyone knows of? - Any help you can give would be much appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance for any help anyone can provide

How about just logging every thing you did to configure it then create a shell script out of it. So all they need to do is run the shell script.

I think this will help you get linux-live then run those scripts and it should create a live cd from what you have on your hard drive. Then you could for example create an icon called "setup" or "install to hard drive" on you Desktop which runs a script to install the system. In it you would need to mkfs (make file system) and setup bootloader etc. I am not sure but you may be able to copy the contents of the cd (excluding the live cd scripts) into / on the hard drive but am not sure on this. But I am sure you could do something like lfs except with the slackware distrobution.
Hope this helps, but more importantly hope it works.
r£vilo

Welcome to LQ. I applaud your efforts to assist the disadvantaged and wish you success with your project.

With respect to your original question about how to clone your existing installation as a bootable CD, IMHO there are two answers. First, to clone a given hard drive, you can use the "dd" command, which simply does a bit-by-bit copy of the source drive to the target drive. For example, if you can install the second hard drive into the PC, you could transfer the contents of the source drive to the target using just
(Substitute the actual device names as needed.) To illustrate, to clone your primary master to your primary slave, you could
Check out the very thorough dd command tutorial that LQ'er AwesomeMachine put together. Along those lines, if you are interested in creating an ISO image of a given directory, you can use the following two commands
The first command will create an image file of the directory you wanted to save, the second will use cdrecord to burn it to CD. Please see the man pages for each of those commands for more info

That said, given your desire to...
the cautionary comment I'd want to make is that although your current machine is fully configured, tweaked and ready to kick butt (which BTW is a pretty impressive accomplishment for anyone who is new to Linux -- well done) the complicating factor lies within the phrase that I italicised. Basically, the potential factor is that these other machines probably will be using different video, audio, storage, etc, components than your machine, which would make a direct transfer difficult. To illustrate, suppose that your machine was using a monitor capable of 1280x1024 resolution, was connected to an HP LaserJet printer, and was using a partitioning scheme where /dev/hda1 was swap, /devhda2 was / (root) and /dev/hda3 was /home. If you had an exact copy of that hard drive on a CD or DVD and tried to install it on someone else's machine, you would run into incompatibilties, such as if the other machine was only capable of rendering a 1024x768 display, was connected to an Epson printer, and the user wanted to dual boot between Windows and Linux, and thus his/her partitioning scheme didn't match your source machine's scheme. In such a scenario, it would be difficult to transfer your exact configuration over to the new PC.

None of this is meant to be interpreted as criticism - instead, what I'd suggest is that now that you've been through the Slackware installation process as well as a followup optimization exercise, I'd be willing to bet that you could easily replicate it on another machine. While those other PC's might not match yours exactly, if you've spent some good time going through the config process, I'd bet you could easily get that other machine up and running Slack in no time. Good luck with it and please post back with a progress report

First of all I spelt mke2fs wrong.Second, to combat the compatability problem I suggest making a bash script that asks the user $PARTITION they wish to install to, then use dd to copy to that partion:
dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/$PARTITION
I also suggest giving the person a recieving the computer a hardware list and a guide on how to configure it. Or possibly making a script that asks them the hardware then edits the config files. I am not sure but maybe you could do this with cat but I am not sure if it saves $variables as $variables or saves their definition (i.e if I set the $variable as 1 it would print/save as 1) which would be very helpful.
Also may I suggest changing your computer which you wich to make a copy to safe settings that are more likely to work on most computers. For example:
-change the monitor to 60hz
-change the resolution to 800x600 or even 1024x768
Then once you have used linux-live or dd to make an iso you can revert it back to normal.
Due to most of the people recieving the computers will be novices, especially to linux. I strongly advise to put copies of these guides on their desktops.
Also Google for the abs guide this will get you on your way with creating scripts. Scripting is basically like how you type in terminal but you have if, for etc.

Thank you very much for your help R£vilo, and for your assistance and kind words J.W. My apologies for not posting back sooner to thank you both - we have been busy resolving some issues with samba/networking which we just discovered (hopefully just a day or twos work) before going all out on the installation CD. It has been a steep learning curve - more a learning cliff! and a sometimes frustrating process but the finished product will be well worth the headaches!

We have found that as we have compiled a very broad 2.6.17.13 kernel, we have been able to do HDD transfers of our install to new drives which are installed in a variety of architectures (ranging from soc-370 Celeron to AMD- Athlon to Pentium 4) with no problems.

Getting all this onto a CD will be the trick!

Once again, thank you for your help and encouragement. I'll post back with further updates.