Hello
I am running Debian and I wish to know if there is a program suitable for building an electronic catalog into a cd.
I have been using LyX alot lately but i am not sure is suitable for catalog building.
Thank you in advance

Yes, there are lots of programs suitable for building a catalog program, and putting it on CD.

However, since you don't give any details about what you're trying to do, it's hard to be specific. What kind of information? What kind of layout? Graphics? Sound? Network? Database driven? Got to have some details about what you want to do.

You can write it in Perl, PHP, Ruby, C, or plain old HTML...what do you want to write it in? How do you want it displayed?

When looking for commercial products you might consider Adobe's Director (http://www.adobe.com/products/director/).

Director has been around for over two decades and is often used to create standalone demos and interactive catalogs. In it's own tradition it supports Windows and Macs. To run it on Linux some VMware-based solution seems to be more optimal then using Wine (also depends on the Director version that you use). It supports animation, sounds and text effects based on a timescore system. It used to have a programming interface (it still has, I guess), so it was possible to build automatic data access to flatfile or SQL databases.

Arch Linux

i think plain old html would be fine.
i need to build the catalog for office, i dun need to learn languages...
just a plain catalog builder that does all the work for me

There is no program that "does all the work for me"...you'll actually have to put effort into it. There are tools that make it simpler, but nothing that'll "just do everything" for you.

If you don't want to learn the language(s) needed, or put effort into it, I'd suggest hiring a consultant.