Judas Linux 0.02

So, I have been working on a Live Linux system for a while now. So far, my results have been fairly. umm. poor. This is mainly due to a lack of knowledge on my part. I have been using the Debian Live system for a while to make the system, but I am thinking of going the harder route and doing this all on my own. My issue is I do not know enough. I am going to do one more release of the system using Debian, but that will be it for debian. I want to make my own distribution, and I know how I want it to be. If anyone can help me in this process, I would greatly appreciate it.

So far I know it will have the following:
A small X11 environment- with jwm (dillo, nedit, leafpad, abiword, gnumeric, xpdf, gimp)


hnb, slrn, mutt and/or pine, naim, links, jed, slocate (and regular busybox esque tools), xli, zgv, cmatrix, sc, mc, rtorrent, kernel-2.6.22

I also wanted to use zsh, and the bsd init system. After hearing about screen, I was considering it for inclusion as well...