USB system with modified kernel and minimal software

[Rene.Sonderegger at RenaiSys.com (Rene Sonderegger)]

Hello everybody,

I'm new to DebianLive. I've been trying to use it for the last couple days, 
but I'm hardly getting anywhere. I would appreciate some help.

Here is what I'm trying to do:
1. Put a modified kernel with a minimal system on a USB drive.
2. Add two executable programs into /usr/local/bin.
3. Add a service script to start the two programs after the system booted.

Here is what I'm working with:
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r1
Kernel 2.6.20.19 pached with RTAI 3.5-cv
Live-helper 1.0~a21-1
Syslinux 1:3.51-1~e

Some of the main problems that I've run into are:
1. After lh_config, change from iso to usp-hdd in config/chroot, lh_build 
and dd if=binary.img of=/dev/sda, "Unknown keyword in syslinux.cfg." shows 
up 4 times and when I press enter to boot it reports "Could not find kernel 
image: /vmlinuz".
2. When I try mount -o loop,offset=512 binary.img /mnt, it reports "mount: 
you must specify the filesystem type".
3. After syslinux -f /dev/sda1, mount /dev/sda1 /mnt and editing 
syslinux.cfg (remove LABLES with localboot) the system boots without the 
syslinux.cfg error messages into Linux Debian 2.6.18.5-486 but not the 
modified kernel 2.6.20.19.
4. To reproduce my steps, I use scripts for most of my work. It would be 
nice to enter something like lh_config -b usb-hdd -p minimal but it just 
reports "lh_config: invalid option - b".

I'm looking forward to you comments. Best regards,
Ren?