Justin,
It sounds like your off to a good start... It may not be as difficult to
make your own distro as you think... For making a bootable cd, (ie eltorito),
you use a boot image when making your cd, its basicly just a tar of a tiny
filesystem that runs in memory. There are many examples of such things. toms
root boot for example is a single bootable floppy disk. a slackware root disk
is a compressed filesystem. The SuSE 7.3 eval disk we gave out at the last
eugeneexpo is infact a bootable cdrom, ( it will find a windows partition and
save config files to it, but the rest runs right from the cd. You might want
to check it out to see what you can do... Slackware also has had in the past
(not sure about current) a live filesystem cd that comes with the distro, its
runs right from the cd, and doesnt install any files onto the hard disk...
Jamie
On Wednesday 12 December 2001 10:25, you wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jacob Meuser [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2001 4:56 PM
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: [EUG-LUG:515] Re: naive distro questions
>
> <snip>
>
> > > program a small perl installer for it...
> > >
> > > is there anything else involved besides the tarball, tar,
> >
> > tools to create
> >
> > > partitions and file systems and a boot disk?
> >
> > If you just follow the Makefiles, you will know exactly how the disks
> > are made and what's on them. I wouldn't be surprised if
> > someone hasn't
> > tweaked it, or done something similar for GNU/Linux already
> > ... perhaps
> > Owl (http://www.openwall.com/) or Gentoo
> > (http://www.gentoo.org/) have
> > something similar? And if not, go for it! I think the
> > install process
> > is definitely the first step in creating a distribution.
>
> i don't know if i want the workload associated with a distribution. i
> would need help. help diffuses the original purpose of the distro because
> everybody has their own ideas and wants. more cruft keeps getting added
> on, somtimes inadvertantly.
>
> i suppose when making a distro, it is of high importance to have a mission
> statement, manifesto, what-not, explaining what exactly this distro claims
> to be, why it exists and just how much cruft the distro is willing to put
> up with. then you have to see who's willing to help with this vision. as
> i see it, a distro "shop" must be run as a benevolent dictatorship.
> herding cats is what it's all about. there can be no compromise when it
> comes to what goes into the distro. cruft must be avoided.
>
> i don't feel comfortable enough with linux right now to even pretend at
> making a distro. i will, however, aim to create that installer script i
> was dreaming of. should that work, maybe you're right. it might be time
> to create a distrobution of my own. it'll be a pretty damn boring distro
> though.
>
> either way, the grand experiment will commence tonight. i have LFS 3.1,
> it's docs, and the FHS standard 2.2 docs. for those who want to know, i
> will keep notes of how long it took to do things when installing LFS, any
> problems i encountered and what i did about them. my goals :
>
> 1. full FHS 2.2 compliancy (note that this will change next year after
> April)
> 2. zsh instead of bash (bash will not exist on system, if possible)
> 3. will use latest kernel (2.4.14?)
> 4. will add lynx, dhcpcd, mutt and vim to the base LFS system. x comes
> later.
> 5. a generic kernel will be used since i plan to tar this up onto a cd
> 6. i plan to keep all sources on system
>
> once i get this installed, i'm going to concentrate on making the boot disk
> and the installer script (gonna call it "setup", a tribute to the old DOS
> days...) after that, i suppose all that's left is to make a "development"
> partition and just keep making the base system better as newer versions of
> everything come out.
>
> i hope this turns out well. maybe then i won't have to "soul search" for
> another distro every month... and thanks for the encouragement jacob.
