Installers for Homebrew Linux Distributions? 17
An anonymous reader asks: "With the relatively easy instructions available from various sources (LSF being one), it's fairly easy now for just about any relatively advanced Linux user to create their own distro. I'm well into creating a distribution (for my friends and myself, nothing major), but I can't seem to find any real projects out there to actually go through an installation process. Anaconda is there, but the lack of documentation is serious. Are there any others out there? If not, what would be required to create one? An obvious start would be a stripped down, bootable Linux CD, and an application to handle partitioning, formatting, setting up the filesystem, and installing packages (of whatever sort), but what all has been done before?"
LFS (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:LFS (Score:5, Informative)
I think a good candidate might be ALFS - the Automated Linux From Scratch. Also remember that LFS only gets you a barebones system that's not really all that usable except to start installing software onto, so you'll need to also check out the 'Beyond LFS' project to get a usable desktop system, if that's what you're after.
If your 'distribution' won't be 'customizable', then just make the CD bootable and copy the setup or a disk image onto the HD.
Re:LFS (Score:2)
I use Gentoo, and the "installer" was fine with me, but there are a lot of real installers out there, even GPL'd ones. Major distributions have written and use them.
There are also tons of tiny distros and bootable Linuxes out there, from tomsrtbt to KNOPPIX; you could use any of them as a starting point, bootstrapping into your installer of choice.
KNOPPIX is a good start... (Score:5, Informative)
Slinky (Score:3, Informative)
Gentoo (Score:2)
Gentoo, slackware.... (Score:2)
Or, you could use parts of Slackware [slackware.com]'s installer. It began as a distro for Pat V. and his friends.....
Re:Gentoo, slackware.... (Score:1)
I played with LFS a while back and even had X up and running with my old window manager Afterstep. [afterstep.org] Too bad a friend needed the drive in an emergency, I never got the chance to "can" it for future use.
GLIS (Score:3, Informative)
Damn Small Linux and bootable business card (Score:2, Informative)
base it on Debian (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides then you can use PGI [progeny.com] and there is good documentation on starting a debian subproject here [debian.org] and as a debian package [debian.org]
Plus even if you don't want to use debian as a base all the installation code is open so you may just be able to learn something from it and they are still trying to rewrite the installation, so maybe you could help an existing project in the process! That's really the open source ideal isn't it?
Re:base it on Debian (Score:1)
MORPHIX (Score:2, Insightful)
here [netmaniacs.org]