If Rsync is working at it's best, only the fragments of files which are different to your local copy are transmitted across the network connection. This means you can update from one version of Knoppix to the next without downloading the whole 700Mb.

It is therefore possible to update your version of Knoppix from one version to the next by downloading only a few magabytes- just the pieces of the files which differ.

The advantages of Rsync are not available when using Rsync to synchronise the whole Knoppix ISO. This is mainly because Knoppix uses a compressed file system. The compressed file system only needs to be changed slightly for all the data to change completely. - The byte offsets change causing the data in each compressed block to be different. Rsync cannot then determine the differences which need to be sent.

Suggestion:
The entire uncompressed, unpacked file system of the current Knoppix image should be made available via anonymous rsync. The user can run a special script to unpack the local copy of Knoppix, Rsync the local copy to the remote copy, then roll the updated version back into an ISO.

This could probably be done with a simple Bash script taking care of all steps- creating a mount point, mounting the ISO, Unpacking the compressed FS, rsyncing the FS then packing the whole lot back into the latest ISO. If binaries from the Knopix ISO were used in the process, the resultant image should theoretically be identical such that an MD5SUM of the resultant ISO would match the latest Knoppix version.

I do not have enough bandwidth here to offer a mirror of the current Knoppix distribution although I could do the scripting.


Another approach would be to have a script and binary data representing the differences which could be patched against a version of Knoppix.