Building your own Linux distro

[viking60]

There are a few services out there that will aid you in building your own Linux distro. Susestudio being the most famous one. But there are others:
Instalinux
Slax
Ubuntu has several posibilities etc.

I have been testing some of them and I will be back with some impressions once I have "finished"......meanwhile; do feel free to suggest other building services.

[rolf]

Linux From Scratch came to mind as an oldie/goldie and it still looks to be maintained. However, I would not want to burden our Fearless Leader with frivolous requests. Just do as the spirit moves you and I'm sure we will be entertained.

[viking60]

Yeah LFS is the real hard core stuff, but I am looking for the oposite. I want that "push the button and get an instant Linux distro" kind of thing. Well as close as one can get to it....

[viking60]

Puh this is going to take a lot more time than I thought. I have tested instalinux and got a net-install image of Centos. That part went well. During installation I get cryptic errors with meaningless messages so I cannot install it.
In Susestudio I picked and altered and even uploaded the gmrun rpm from Centos and tried to build a pure Openbox distro. Susestudiuo does apparently take care of dependencies so if you get no error messages you can continue to the build.....
And that is a loooooong story: In order to test-run the image online you need to build it first and I had to try it ten times! before it went through.
So finally I saw my superduper distro and --- could not startx due to a lacking libxext6 so that dependency check is not 100%.
That is part of life so you only go back and add it and start a re-build - only to discover that it fails again and that the Suse team has been notified. I must have notified them to death over the last 24 hours....
(An internal build error occurred. The SUSE Studio team has been notified)

It does work, kind of, and the graphical login I have set up looks beautiful and continues to cli login where I do log in (and cannot start X) - so I have an installable distro that does not work yet.
I have built pretty standard stuff there before and it worked then too. But when you really challenge the system by building something out of the box it seems to limp - a lot!
But as I am not finished so I will hang in there fore a bit longer.... So far this is no easy way to build your own distro

(LFS would not take any longer AFAICT so maybee the tip was good after all )
Anyway the Suse server seems to be working again now (the notifications may have worked) so I am happy at the moment....

[rolf]

Yes, well, my idea of easy roll your own is roll that CD/DVD right into the tray and start installing.
So, I don't have any experience suitable for recommending options. However, Puppy has always struck me as marching to a different

You might take a look at Woof: the "Puppy builder"

For a long time I have dreamt of a "magical script" that could download packages of some other distro, cut them right down to Puppy-size, then build a Puppy Linux live-CD -- and do all of this totally automatically.

Finally free of front-line responsibility for managing the Puppy project, I had time to pursue this dream. The result is Woof.

This is what Woof does:

1. Download another distros packages, so we don't have to host them anywhere (although in some cases the distro may not have a suitable package so we still need some of our own PET packages).
   
2. Totally automatially build a Puppy live-CD iso file, with your choice of packages.
   
3. Totally automatically build the 'devx' SFS file (which is how Puppy provides support for C/C++/Vala/Genie/Fortran compiling).
   
4. Support multiple distros.
   
5. Easily upgrade to a new version.
   
6. The end result is Puppy Linux

Hopefully, Fearless Leader can find some easy succes with Woof.

[viking60]

Yes I noticed so I will try woff. But I have a functional rpm based distro with openbox now. All with Suse repos (and one uploaded rpm from centos). I had to script a little and I am trying to automate most of the settings we discussed in the openbox thread. So I will get closer to finished with that first, if the Suse server is in the mood to play along....
As Linus would say: It is almost usable

[viking60]

Puh! Ok Susestudio does work, and you can in fact build advanced stuff there. The rpms that I lacked I imported to my own viking60-repo that is now one of the repos attached to this live cd and install image.
UserID=user
Password=user
root-password=linux

The live CD is fully functional but I did not spend any more time in auto-activating the "whistles and blows". Areosnap and Alt+F2 works and if you want it to look good just run these in Alt+F2

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xcompmgr -c

to pick the lovely background:

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nitrogen --no-recurse /home/user/

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tint2

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neap

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cairo-dock

This goes for the live cd if you install it they all should be activated. You can also take a ksnapshot from there (I forgot to bind the printkey - I'll do it in the next version) or start the konsole.
......
There are a lot of tools on this CD and most of them are terminal tools. Gparted is there +++ I have thought that I should use it as a LiveCD tool so if there are programs that must be included please let me know so I can add them
You can download it from
http://susestudio.com/a/Ermw0p/viking-s-berserk-os

There should be two iso's; use the LiveCD- the preload iso is rubish...
Video coming up

[rolf]

Ok. I am here

The boot splash is beautiful! All the ufos flying around the view from Fearless Leaders balcony, apparently having done some reconstructive surgery on Viking60.

But, everything is in Norski. I barely was able to figure out how to get the at in my email address to login to dropbox and I have already forgot. Maybe there is some way to get the superior American localization ahead of time that I did not see. All in all, very nice, good job.

[viking60]

Oh there!: See what hapens when you do not pay attention in School Clearly you have been sleeping in the Norski class
I'll see if I can add some foreign (I thought I had )
Edit:
No The default should be foregin (English) it is all English here

You must have picked Norsk during boot (like any good Berserk)
If you want some eye-candy (that you do not need - everything is working on that boring background too) you can hit ALT+F2 and enter the commands above....

[viking60]

Ok I just released version 0.0.30 here the auto login should work right out of the box and I hope that the English is OK too.
If anyone can confirm it would be great. (Use F2 on the boot screen to set your keyboard).
You can download it here
Before I start with the next build system.
It can be used as a recue CD It has Gparted and a lot of goodies on it including nmap, newsbeuter, inxi, ++++

[rolf]

Whoa whoa whoa! Didn't you pay your tithing to Über SUSE? Looks like susestudio is serving your iso off a dial-up server.....

[rolf]

I am here, again, now in 0.30
%¤#"!§¤%&/()=?`_:;M§¦¡@ damn norski keyboard

I did F2 to make sure of English, USA and saw a keyboard choice in that picture but did not know how to get to the keyboard choice. Maybe I have to do F2 two times.

Also different this time, since I just hit Enter last time, I went to F3 for some video choices. My monitor is 16:10 and my eyes like 1280x800 but that choice is hard to find in wizards. So, I went with 1280x960.

Next, I get the black desktop whereas last time I got the simple DOS+like )see, Norski!= Clicking the right mouse button gets me to konsole to do

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dhclient eth1

to give me internet so I can come here to my school.

Then, I ran all the commands to get the Berserk balcony autumn and cairo+dock, pretty nice, except this keyboard!! I donæt see a locale configurator in Applications.

So, now I have to resize my screenie to some smaller width to fit in here but there is no image editor that I can see. I see Software Management in the Applications menu but that hangs, so I type yast in a root terminal. That tries to start but the hung first try of yast is blocking. So I finally kill that and go forward, eventually, to install gimp.