Packages to override in guest

[jreese at leetcode.net (John Reese)]

Hi,

I know that there has been plenty of work, and that pretty much any 
distro/repo other than debian/sid is likely broken from user-setup, etc.

What I would like to do is to create live images of both Etch and Ubuntu 
Gutsy, but everytime I do so, I end up with either initramfs breaking 
before mounting the squashfs filesystem, or the live system hangs at 
runlevel inits without ever logging in.

So getting to my question, what list of .deb packages from sid should I 
download, what directories should the packages go into, and what do I 
need to change in my config files to get things working?

Thank you.

--
John Reese
LeetCode.net