Hi guys

I guess I'm kind of creating my own Linux from scratch.


I have a livecd that starts bash but it's not logged in as a user.

If I do "whoami" it says whoami: cannot find username for UID 0

Does anyone know the absolute bare minimum requirements to login as a user?

I have created an /etc/passwd file

I have "login" and "getty" binaries ready too.

If I type "login" I get login: PAM Failure, aborting: Critical error - immediate abort

If anyone can give me some pointers or links about what I'm missing and what it takes to be able to login I'd be very appreciative

This is quite old, but still informative: From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt-HOWTO .

As far as the specific issues, there may be something wrong with syntax of the passwd file or some other problem where it can't resolve the UID to a name. And as far as the PAM crap, I have no idea. You might be better off building a PAM-less system for this.

Also, you could just build the usual LFS and just deviate from the 'recipe' where you felt like it.

digiot thank you very much for your reply. I'd definitely be interested in creating a PAM-less system, if you have any other guides or info about that I'd be interested to know.

Thanks!

Sorry, I don't know of a guide and a cursory search didn't turn one up, but a more determined search might. AFAIK, for most things it should simply be a case of not having the libraries and/or explicitly not linking to them when you build. For others, you may have to take more strenuous efforts - looking at the Slackware source for the shadow package may be helpful.

If you want to build your own Linux, you have 3 GREAT options to work from:

(Google them and post the links!)

LFS (Linux from Scratch)

Gentoo (Gentoo.org - simply the fastest distro, you can choose which bits you want to do yourself - provides a great tool "portage" to automatically compile everything for your setup, based on your settings and flags... hence, could take a few days to get a fully functioning gnome/kde system)

Slackware ... used to be pretty manual in the older versions, and all the tools are probably available on the livecds/installcds to make it fairly simple to do your own thing

KNOPPIX ... Ideal base to start off from, its a bootable livecd with everything you could dream of. The CD version is actually better than the DVD version since you can load the whole CD to RAM with the "toram" option. Based on Debian

And... to quote SuSe... "have a lot of fun..."