Lucid OEM install slow - possible to speed up the process?

[Carsten Agger]

I'm currently preparing an OEM installation for a vendor who desires to 
sell Ubuntu pre-installed on a 10" netbook. I'm installing from a USB 
stick with the Lucid release candidate alternate install.

Basically I press F4 for "modes", select OEM and proceed with the 
installation. Afterwards the vendor setting up the computer is supposed 
to run a script manually which I expect to put on the CD by preseeding 
(but haven't done that yet).

One problem with this approach is that it's incredibly slow, much slower 
than installing from the live CD. Why is that? I suppose it must be more 
or less the same packages.

I believe I did an install from the live CD in twenty minutes, but the 
OEM install takes more than an hour. This is sort of acceptable since 
the actual customer will not have to do this, still ... is it possible 
to do this also in twenty minutes or at least understand why?

And, once oem-config-prepare is scheduled to run, might it be possible 
to simply replicate the installation by grabbing an image and copying on 
boot to another, identical computer? In that way one would only have to 
do the original OEM install once, the rest could be image-replication.

best regards and thanks in advance for any response,

Carsten Agger

PD: I'm unsure which list to ask this on. Yesterday, I tried posting 
this question on the ubuntu-devel list but apparently it was not 
approved, so now I'm trying here. Excuse me if inappropriate.