slightly OT: custom Linux distro

mattbates · 5th September 2005

Hi,

This is slightly off-topic but I'm hoping some of the people on this forum may be able to help or at least contribute some feedback.

I would describe myself as a competent Linux/*BSD user and I am interested in creating a custom *nix (most probably Linux) distribution. The reason being the fact that I would like to be able to deploy a customised OS on a PC for a specific purpose. However it is something that is - at the moment - a step above my current knowledge!

Does anybody have any experience with custom distros? Maybe Linux from Scratch or similar?

I would appreciate any thoughts and feedback

.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Matt

BurtyB · 5th September 2005

Linux from scratch seems to be a waste of time if you want to keep it uptodate (from what I remember).

You'll probably get more done if you base it on an already existing distro. You could just install it and mod it to how you wanted it, then tar it up and deploy with a few scripts on a boot CD.

ChrisB.

samb · 6th September 2005

Very much depends what you want to do, but for anything other than embedded I'd agree with BurtyB that basing it on a pre-existing distro would be a good idea. It'll make your life a hell of a lot easier with regards to security updates/backports and the like.

heypresto · 6th September 2005

In my day-job we have developed our own distro, I believe based on Slackware. It's proved tremendously useful and easy to maintain and manage (this is for servers only). However we do have a real Linux guru in-house who does the development work for the kernel, installer etc. We can then develop our own packages on top of that.

But, it's a lot of work, and unless you can dedicate someone to the task, it may not be worth it.