A few questions about customization

[Dieter Scholz <rd-disc@gmx.net>]

Hello,

first of all I'm a newbie concerning Debian Live, but have a good knowledge of 
Debian in general.

I've installed the live-helper and cdebootstrap packages into a lenny system 
and tried to customize the default "etch" iso image creation process. But I 
had some problems:

* What's the difference between the chroot and the binary stage? For me it's 
not obvious when to use which directory (binary* or chroot*) created in 
config after lh_config.

* I would like to boot the iso using a default keyboard layout 
of "de-latin1-nodeadkeys" and a locale of de_DE@UTF-8 (not using boot 
parameters). I managed to set the locale by using an interactive debconf mode 
but failed to achieve setting the keyboard (even so I configured it correctly 
with interactive debconf). If I use "install-keymap" or "dpkg-reconfigure 
console-data" in the created iso, I'm able to switch it. How can I do this in 
a noninteractive way when creating the iso?

* I would like to customize some config files inside the image. I was able to 
replace ".bashrc" and add ".vimrc" in the root dir by putting the file in the 
chroot_local-includes directory but wasn't able to replace "/etc/sysctl.conf" 
neither by putting it in "chroot_local-includes" or "binary_local-includes". 
How would I do that? How do I replace default configuration files of packages 
in general?

* How does preseeding work. Is it "debconf-get-selections | grep <PACKAGE> > 
CONFFILE" and then putting "CONFFILE" in the preseed directory? Is this the 
answer to my second question?

I know, this is a lot of stuff to answer. But I'm very interested in using 
Debian Live and so I hope you could help me. Thanks.

Greetings,

Dieter