Hello all,

I've been a user of BSD and Linux for approx, 5 years now and I am currently looking at compiling my own install from source. Starting with the base Linux kernel, what programs would I need for a base, minimal install? Just to boot up, locally log in and go to bash. I had planned on pulling down the most recent required GNU programs, determining their dependencies, and compiling them from source, as well. I hate just taking any technology for granted without understanding its makeup and how it operates.

I am doing all of this as an educational experience. What I would like to learn is, the sequence of events, how code and hardware interacts, what is required for a bootable system and doing it for myself, though I know it would be easier to just pull down a disc with it all done and be ready to go.

Thanks in advance,
-sed

Then you should consider having a look at linux from scratch at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Linux from Scratch comes to mind (tedious to build even for an experienced guru)...

or...

Crux is a nice minimal distro that is mostly bare bones with Xorg-7.2 which is a great distro to build up a custom system, i just built Linux-2.6.21.2 on it just this morning and i am waiting for Alsa-1.0.14 to get officially released (it is an rc for now)...

I'll have to check out LFS. Does it contain the bare minumum programs/packages that is needed? I'm intersted in an absolutely no bloat base install. After doing a little research, I built a database of dependencies (based upon only grub and the kernel) and came up with these core files:

• bash
• binutils
• bison
• coreutils
• diffutils
• findutils
• flex
• gawk
• gcc
• gettext
• glibc
• grep
• grub
• gzip
• kernel
• m4
• make
• modutils
• ncurses
• perl
• sed
• texinfo

I also found a really good site containing a lot of information in a single respository for those who may be interested:
Fultus eLibrary

wow, you really want a "bare" bare bones system, i think there is a distro that comes on two floppy diskettes (cant remember the name of it just now)...

floppix

LFS isn't really a distro if I understand it. It's a series of excellent docs on how to build your own system. You get exactly what you want and not one byte more.

You can build a system so lean it won't even work

Outstanding. That's basically what I'm trying to do. Sounds like I'll have something to do over the long weekend! Thanks to all for the assist.