How to start my own distro?

leftistman · 03-13-2008, 12:34 PM

I know, it's kind of a weird question to ask in the newbies forum and i guess it's kind of asking to get flamed type of a question, but I'm serious.
I'm thinking about creating my own distro just to learn how it's done.
the must common answer would probbaly be "go to linux from scratch" but i looked into it and i don't want to start from scratch and i don't want to create a live cd like slax.
i'm thinking more about taking some distro (fedora, ubuntu, whatever) and modify it.
but i have no clue what's to do first.
what i want to do is change messages in the install process, maybe change the disk partition program, have my favorite packages installed, stuff like that.
any reference material and suggestions will be welcomed.

lord-fu · 03-13-2008, 01:15 PM

Hello and welcome to LQ.

You could download a distro mount the iso modify the installation files and burn it back to disk then install with that. You would just need to dig through the install scripts and find what you wanted to change, prepackage etc.
Remember everything is a file here, everything can be changed.

hth

rosspy · 03-13-2008, 04:15 PM

You could also try linux from scratch http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

anomie · 03-13-2008, 04:34 PM

Check out Fedora spins (new as of Fedora 8) -- it piqued my interest when I read about it, but I haven't had a chance to test it out.

johnsfine · 03-13-2008, 04:36 PM

The website, wiki or forum for a distribution probably has a "remaster script". If you go to any distribution specific forum and search for remaster, you should find it.

Often it is a manual script (shell commands but not a shell script).

The key and complicated step is to chroot to a read/write copy of the liveCD while running in some outer boot of Linux (which may also be the liveCD) which has the same kernel. Then you can use the ordinary package installer to install new packages and/or ordinary configuration methods to reconfigure other things. Then exit the chroot, clean up a few things and pack that read/write copy as a .iso file.

I've wondered if there was any reason you needed to do anything that complicated for small changes, but I haven't tried it myself. I think you should be able to just make (or simulate with aufs) a read/write copy of the liveCD, then directly change a few files in the copy (without needing to chroot and run inside that copy) then pack it to a .iso file.