Debian base tarballs

[David Welton <davidw@master.debian.org>]

So, I am now working on the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card, as well
as, on my own, putting Debian on an RS6000 that we have here.

In both cases, I want to do the following:

dump base*.tgz out into a directory and configure it.  Extracting it
is not the problem, but I need to gain a more thorough understanding
of how it goes from being untarred to being configured, as well as
some of the attendant features.  Is this the right place for this
discussion or would the bootdisks lists be better?  It's not so much
that I am actually, at this point, creating the bootable image, but
the larger filesystems that will be used...

Thanks,
-- 
David N. Welton            (    Circa mea pectora 
davidw@prosa.it            )    multa sunt suspiria
http://www.efn.org/~davidw (    de tua pulchritudine
debian.org + prosa.it      )    que me ledunt misere