Interest in a lower compression iso optimized for USB booting?

[grindstone]

I'll volunteer to do it as well--just need clear communication about when it's "up" or if you want text only, etc. I've got a couple even older machines I can drag-out too.

This brings-up another issue, specifically, the stuff inside the squashfs files that's gzipped -- like the initrd.

I started looking the other day and started taking screens in Vbox, but I haven't figured-out anticap's scripts enough to remaster (I'm new here and build-iso itself is 4k lines, etc) outside of the tool yet.

Soooo, the initrd about 25MB, gzipped inside the squash is 10+ MB. Applying xz to that gets it to ~7.5MB etc. Kernel config looks like it's built to boot from xz as well. Compressing the initrd with xz seems to boot (Slackware uses it) _if_ the --check=crc32 is used at compression, FWIW.

If you
grep -iE "(initrd|xz|initramfs)" ./config-5.10.188-antic.1-486-smp
and
grep CONFIG_RD_

all that stuff is the same as the Slackware config that boots xz-compressed initrds, FWIW.

I just don't know enough yet--now many md5 checks are in the installer where, etc, or how to remaster ($MAKE_ISO seems command-line arg in the script so not even xorriso cmd, etc). I looked at some mx scripts too but it's all unclear. Perhaps you have build customizations further divorced from antix as well, etc.