Inventing my own linux

[teak]

What would I need to learn to put together my own Linux, like if I wanted to invent-

Green Lizard Linux?

What kind of education would I need?

Tino

Thanks

[hlrguy]

I took the liberty of picking tacoma washington mirror.

Linux From Scratch (http://lfs.linux-phreak.net/lfs/news.html)

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with the steps necessary to build your own custom Linux system.

hlrguy

[kevinalm]

hlrguy beat me to it. LFS is definately a good start. Very good for learning how the parts of a linux system fit together. Be advised though you need to be _very_ familiar with compiling packages from source. And considerable experience with the cli and kernel customization is highly reccomended.

I'm working in LFS5.0 as I post this and I'm currently downloading LFS5.1. I'm quite pleased.

[CaptainPinko]

1) for experience you might want to try some more bare bones distros like Gentoo or Slackware or something just to get a better understanding of linux. If you use a more sophisticated distro you may want to start by rebuilding some of your system from source RPMs.

2) You'll want learn shell scripting and probably PYQT or PyGTK to make your installer if you plan on having one.

3) one of the first thing you'll need to decide is your package management format. RPM is probably perferable since it is part of the LSB and the most packages exist for it.

4) you might want to pick the distro that best suits your needs and start modifying it. IIRC that more-or-less how YellowDog came aboue, modifying RedHat and compiling it for PPC and some of it's own tools (ie. YUM).




I would love to hear about your target market and design decisions. I've been itching to try to work on a project like this and I'm sure someother around here might too. Keep us informed.

[MasonS]

Also, SuSE is a green lizard, so check on copyright issues...:)

[mr orion77]

im about to embark on this journey myself, so
its possible to use any type of package format i.e. deb and rpm thus allowing apt for ease of upgrades

[homey]

One popular option is to "remaster" an existing distro such as Knoppix. That way you get a head start on a concept which already works. When I made my "un-distro", I modified knoppix to trim it down alot, added clamav and a few other things to my liking. I also used a similar idea with Slax and the rebuild package which they have.

Lots of fun and frustration at the same time. :)

[mdwatts]

I've noticed Linux distro 'building' scripts/packages listed on freshmeat.net from time to time. In fact there was one posted there just the last week or so.

[janet loves bill]

there is also BELFS<bleeding edge LFS>
if one wants all the up to date packages and using the 2.6 kernel to build from.
http://lfs.linux-phreak.net/lfs/view/unstable/

[o0zi]

If you're utterly new to it all, I'd suggest you try and remaster Knoppix.
Seriously, it's not difficult - my first remaster has ended up somewhat popular..

[serz]

o0zi, what HOWTO/guide did you use? Any suggestions?

[o0zi]

Well, I used the remastering HOWTO (http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/KnoppixRemasteringHowto) on Knoppix.net, and I asked any questions I had in the Customising and Remastering forum.
Checking out forums of remasters is helpful as well, such as Feather, Damn Small, and Morphix. You can also build a Live-CD using the scripts that SLAX uses - you simply customise your system on your hard drive to your heart's desire, run the scripts, and you've got an ISO you can burn to a CD.

[serz]

Bad thing about those scripts is that you're very limited due to the lack of documentation, really.

Today I spent many many hours to do something kind of my way, but I wasn't very lucky.

Thanks for the info. I'll do a knoppix-remaster, I think it's a good idea since I wanted to do something debian-based (if I had had luck with that).

Oh, and by the way, I'm going to try your distro in a few mins :)

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by janet loves bill
there is also BELFS<bleeding edge LFS>
if one wants all the up to date packages and using the 2.6 kernel to build from.
http://lfs.linux-phreak.net/lfs/view/unstable/ Which is no longer updated by itself (BE-LFS was never meant to be a fork of the LFS book, instead, it was meant to be a place where a couple of developers could start to introduce some bleeding-edge features without arguing with the rest of the development community nonstop about all of them). It's been merged into LFS CVS HEAD for quite a while now (a few weeks at least):

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/HEAD/

The page you linked to is only a mirror of that one (that one is canonical).

[teak]

Thanks fo all your replies. Yes, I was very psychic, I was born to know windows. Actually, as a newbe I was just curious. OK? Right now I am learning UNIX. But hope to continue on with Linux.
Why did you even mention windows? My favorite game on Mandrake was Kill Bill-Scratchex.

[mdwatts]

One that I mentioned above at freshmeat.net on building your own distro is http://www.linux-live.org/ which allows you to build your own Live CD distro.