Ubuntu Live CD Customization II

I posted this a while ago, and I've recently updated the Live CD mentioned in the post. It's still based on Ubuntu Dapper Drake, and I still used the howto here to get the basics. A useful find was this script, which frees about 100Mb by removing all the non-essential packages.

Here are few other tweaks:

• To place an icon on the desktop when the CD loads, put the relevant .desktop file in /etc/skel/desktop
• To put files in the user's home directory, place them in /etc/skel
• If one of the files you want the user to be able to access easily is a pdf (such as a user guide), place a shortcut on the desktop be be warned that evince (the standard pdf viewer) doesn't open maximized. Annoyingly, you can't control this from the command line either. What you can do is leave a "last used settings" file in the user's home directory, to fool evince into thinking that the last pdf it opened was opened maximised. The easiest way to do this is to open any pdf, maximise it, close evince and copy the file ~/.gnome2/evince/ev-metadata.xml to /etc/skel/.gnome2/evince/ev-metadata.xml on the livecd.
• Usually you'll want to get rid of the "install" icon on the desktop. This avoids the user accidentally installing ubuntu with the CD you swore wouldn't touch their existing operating system. To find the .desktop file to edit (make it point to something else you'd like on your desktop - although according to this howto, you should just be able to edit the script that copies it on, which didn't work for me) use locate ubiquity*.desktop
• To change the desktop background to your own 1600×1200 png: Edit the file /var/lib/gconf/debian.defaults/%gconf-tree.xml and change the string /usr/share/backgrounds/warty-final-ubuntu.png to point to your file.