how to make your own distro?

jsul255227 · 08-01-2003, 09:42 PM

how would i go about making my own distro that would fit on a floppy?

shortfusesniper · 08-01-2003, 11:04 PM

Well.. Why not just go for Hal91!? It's a distro that fits on a floppy.. is it really necessary that you make your own??

The Hal91 link: http://www.itm.tu-clausthal.de/~perle/hal91/

andrew001 · 08-01-2003, 11:04 PM

If you just need a distro that fits on a floppy you should check out linuxrouter.org , and I know there's another one too. You could just customize that or something like it.

I'm not sure how you'd do this by yourself, I'd think about make a boot disk out of a custom kernel, and then adding in 'sh' for the init and whatever other goodies you would like.

You might also want to check out www.linuxfromscratch.org

Maybe you could make a really small one and plop it on floppy.

jsul255227 · 08-01-2003, 11:19 PM

would this be really hard to do or would it only take a few hours or something like that cuz i got 2 weeks before school starts and nothing to do between now and then. and if someone could tell me the files i will be needing to do this and where i could find them that would be really helpful.

brice2nice · 08-01-2003, 11:27 PM

By having a lot of time to lose and a lot of patience

scott_R · 08-01-2003, 11:29 PM

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Pocket-Linux-Guide/html/

will show you how to do that. However, if you're just interested in having a mini distro, you can check google. There are lots of them.

2damncommon · 08-02-2003, 10:23 AM

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/index.html

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO/index.html

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...ibrary/l-lwl1/

zero_copy · 08-03-2003, 08:26 AM

i kinda feel obligated to put my 2 cents in here....
for me, my issue was getting it up and running intially, u make a fs and its all well and good, but then u need to ahve staticly compiled libs etc, move them onto the parition then from there use them to compile the "real" apps u will use....very ver time consuming,....

but of course that was the short, short version, btw i went by the linuxfromscratch doc(s) too.

i found it fun but it was to time consuming to put any real finishing touches to it.

Strike · 08-03-2003, 12:55 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by jsul255227
would this be really hard to do or would it only take a few hours or something like that cuz i got 2 weeks before school starts and nothing to do between now and then. and if someone could tell me the files i will be needing to do this and where i could find them that would be really helpful.

It's something that's really hard to do. LFS (Linux From Scratch) isn't all that tough, but it's also not "making your own distro" either, it's just going through the steps to set up your own system.

Why do you want to create your own distribution? There are scads of them already. What would this one do that other distros don't do? In general, the answer to the "should I make my own distro?" question is "no"

2damncommon · 08-03-2003, 01:11 PM

Strike is correct.
There may either be a good reason you want to create your own floppy utility or you may just want to see how. If so, read the docs and give it a try.
But there is no reason to re-invent the "wheel" when Tom's is all you need.
(Or any of the good floppy utility distros available.)