Filesystems

I am intrigued about the working of filesystems.We had a discussion about how live cds work,but couldn't get any solid idea.Searching on the net didn't reveal much directly.So,today I just opened up google and typed Live CD,and lo...Wikipedia's entry took me to about 30 sites by now.I just read up the articles on various methods used and the associated filesystems.But didn't do any serious study.
Unlike the usual FAT,NTFS or the Linux native ext3 or ext2,the filesystems used for this are like CramFS,Cloop,SquashFS,zisofs,UnionFS,auFS etc etc..too many eh?

Basically what I understood was that 'compression' of the boot image is what is done by most of these.CramFS stands for Compressed Filesystem,Cloop is for Compressed loopback(used in Knoppix to compress the approx 2 GB image to fit into a standard CD).There is also this UnionFS which perform Union Mount that merges directory and file nodes of different filesystems.How it actually works,that I didn't lookup,as just the variety of systems used itself has stopped me from going into any one of these deeply.I should clearly understanding the basics.

I also found some interesting sites explaining the process of creation of a Custom Live CD,(Building Your Own Live CD) and also some articles on softwares like the 'remastersys' for creating live cds from Ubuntu.It is loosely based on mklivecd in Mandriva and remasterme in PCLinuxOS.

The entire concept of filesystems is interesting,but can be quite complicated and at times tough to understand.I should refer to my text book(Tanenbaum) and see if there are any interesting stuff in it.Ebooks don't give the pleasure of reading,which a real book provides.I have tonnes of ebooks on all topics,but I wish I had real books of at least half of that number.

Hope you all have read about the phenomenal record that Firefox 3 made...more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.Things are going good for the FSF and the OSI as well.Adios..