Problems building on Ubuntu my ArtistX 0.5

[escherian at gmail.com (Marco Ghirlanda)]

Hi all, working for ArtistX 0.5 (Sid) on Ubuntu Feisty with Debian Live 
v.47 I have this two little problems:

- putting a LOT (>2000) .deb in the chroot_local_packages dir stops Live 
Helper with a "argument too long" error.
Same is if I move during the interactive phase all my debs in 
chroot/var/cache/apt/archives and dpkg -i *.deb.
I guess this is not Live Helper related (cp gives me the same error, I 
have to use nautilus as root...).

Workaround: move all necessary debs in chroot's apt cache and then just 
fire up aptitude in the interactive shell and install ONEbyONE (sigh!) 
all necessary packages.

- My final iso works only in the Virtual World (Vmware Server, 
Virtualbox....) at Vga 640x480.
On ANY other computer I've tried (Laptop Thinkpad T42p, HP63xx series, 
assembled ones and Desktops: Asus P1, Assembled Athlon....) it will 
bring me down to a full shell on the live system (not busybox) and I can 
start X by doing: sudo gdm and then it will work just fine.

Workaround: None for the moment (tried to install sequentially or all 
together mdetect, discover1, acpid with no luck).

Any hints really appreciated, I wasn't seeing this on older ArtistX 
releases.

I'm starting thinking again to a GUI (Live Magic is far too complicate 
for Joe user).
No other features except (in any order):
- step 1 choose your distro (Stable, Testing and Unstable)
- step 2 select & copy three files for graphic customization (splash.png 
of isolinux, background.png for splashy and debian-blueish-wallpaper.svg 
for gnome wallpaper)
- step 3 launch aptitude and let he user add software
- step 4 interactive shell
- step 5 chose distro name, hostname, username and pwd (ArtistX in the 
isolinux menu and as the username and hostname)

I definitely think this would be a success between distro customizers 
and a great occasion to sponsor Debian Live and bring it to the 
attention of Linux users.
How long would it take to do a such thing in GTK? How much would it 
cost? Is it possible to sponsor it? Any guys willing to collaborate on 
this?...........

Regards,

Marco Ghirlanda