Hi friends,

I am revan,I am very much interested in operating systems and I am a beginner.I just finished understanding OS concepts.I want to create my own OS.But i am thinking of creating a linux distro first and then going towards complicated things.How i need to equip myself for creating it.What should i know,learn and where to start.Can you guys plz helpme? Thanx in advance guys.

Hello, you might want to check this.

Also, check out Linux live scripts
( http://www.linux-live.org/ )

Maybe you should find a place to fit into an existing distribution instead. It's quite a workload to develop your own distribution if you are a beginner who just finished understanding OS concepts. Besides the intersection of stuff between OS development and distribution is very small compared to the union (meaning there's a lot in both alone but not together) unless you're looking at a BSD system where the OS is a complete (if perhaps minimal) system and not just packages thrown together.

For what it's worth, I had my go at CLFS and realized why you can't just "throw packages together", and why most people don't have the patience to put a distro together. I certainly don't have anywhere near the patience to do so.
Kevin Barry

Well, I guess I meant "thrown together" in the manner that produces a system with the lowest amount of entropy, with my point - the level of organization and difficulty notwithstanding - still being that Linux distributions are at their core other people's software which is tied together using scripts and utility programs, not actual OS development. The OP said they want to "create my own OS" and perhaps I took it a bit too literally but if you're building a distribution from other people's code you're not doing real OS devel work as I tend to think about it. Writing a driver, implementing a scheduling algorithm, tweaking a memory allocator, improving the performance of the IPv6 stack: that's work on the operating system. (Even so I did acknowledge the difficulty of building a distro when I said the OP should join somebody else's project rather than start their own.)

Wow Reavean ... that's very ambitious ... good luck with your project !


Debian