I've encountered this issue before several times, and every time there's some vocal people who say that there is no need for customized Ubuntu live CDs as there's no demand for this. Well you know, if you don't have the need to customize Ubuntu live CDs, it doesn't mean nobody is missing the feature. I am, for instance.

Even this brainstorming project as at least two similar requests [1], [2], so the demand is there. However, I don't want to be able just to remaster the official images, I want to be able to _create_ my custom images using the same tools that are used to create the official images.

As far as I know, Ubuntu is about free software and ideas behind this. So I see no reason why the tools used by Ubuntu internally are kept as some kind of a secret. I would like to be able to improve the tools, and contribute the changes back, and if they are liked, they would get incorporated to the official tree, just like with any free software project.

I think Fedora is leading the way in this matter [3]. They have developed a tool for this, pungi [4]. I'm not suggesting that Ubuntu should start using this tool as image creation tool since the pungi codes is probably coupled quite tightly with Fedora/RPM infrastructure, but similar project for Ubuntu would be very nice to have. Of course, if pungi or some other existing tool would be feasible for the task, using existing code is of course a good thing to do.

[1] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/320/
[2] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/432/
[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CustomSpins
[4] https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/pungi