Custom livecd's, virtualbox, seamlessrdp and sata dvd burners...

I thought this writeup was interesting on the idea of using a web interface to customize a livecd. I've built a couple livecd's (that I still use) for tech support, but I'm always thinking of one more tool that I'd like to have. After looking through their wizard it seems a bit limited in the granularity of what can be chosen (at least for what I'm thinking of.) But... it might introduce a new interest in the use of livecds.

I haven't tried it yet, but there's a "ready for primetime" open source x86 virtual machine program called virtualbox that's just recently released version 1.5 It sounds pretty good. I've got a fair amount of disk images invested in vmware at the time so I don't know if I would swap, but I want to look over the features and just see how it stacks up.

Along those lines... I saw someone mention seamless rdp with regards to virtualbox and had to have a look - basically you install seamless rdp on a windows xp or other remote access windows server, then you use rdesktop to connect to the machine specifying the path to the seamless rdp executable and you can get the single application window on your desktop instead of the full blown user interface. (Much like the way remote X applications work.) In fact you can redirect sound/etc and it works fairly well (although I've found programs that don't work well with it too.) Here's an example command line from the client...
rdesktop -A -s "c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe notepad" ipaddressofrdpserver

My server that I setup with mirrored hard drives has really been a fine machine, but I am missing one thing (optical drive.) This Lite-on SATA dvdrw might fit the bill ($32).