This is a timeless question, one I have asked a few times, and others as well. I have yet to really find the solutions I am looking for and think maybe I am asking the wrong question. Here is a summary of the problem I am facing. Any help would be most appreciated.

www.distrowatch.com list many, many, many new versions of linux. They wen't linux from scratch. Most of them are built off of slackware, or debian, or fedora. This means someone else did the ground work, and they just configured it to their tastes.

Now, I would like to make my own distro as well. Not LFS, rather, built on one of these as well. It would seem a lot of people know how to do this by the numerous distros available now. I am especialy interested in creating my own flavor, then creating an ISO that people can install.

What I am looking for in this thread is a BASIC roadmap for how to do this, as well as how to create the ISO. Here's the catch. I don't want other people installing my config's. It needs to be able to analyse their computer in an install process. Slax does this, I want to as well. once I get the basic road map, then I can begin the task of learning each process. Thanks, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Chase

well..

most distro's are exactly the same except for.... The package management tools, some distro specific tools.. (like redhat-config-network), the install program... and the auto-detect and configure programs...

(ohh, and maybe a few kernel patches)

fist of all... decide what kind of distro you are going to make...
decide what other distro's lack, and what you are going to do to improve that, then get on freshmeant.net and see of you van get any opensourtce programmers to work with you.

I also sometimes wonder how one would go about building one's own distro? It seems this is the case of "if you have to ask, you're not ready"
But rolling your own LFS and going over their books would surely be a good learning experience, whether you'll end up using LFS as your base or not.
I think Slax has a bit of info about scripts it uses for its iso... Morphix might be of interest to you as well. Also, have a look at Rock Linux, which is meant to be a 'distro building kit' that can be customised as desired.

So far slax has been the most promising. It has a few links to some scripts that allow you to roll up your install onto a live cd (which is what slax does) and since we all know you can transfer slax to your hard drive, there should be no reason why I couldnt do this as well. I am now wondering if this is the best way. I'll check with sourceforge anyway, though, thanks for the tip.

Whether I can do it or not has little to do with if I will. While I am sure I don't know as much about linux as others, I am a devoted user. There seems no greater way to learn than to build. I am sure you had your way, this seems to work for me. Thanks for all or your support.