Roll your own Linux distro

David M Williams
Tuesday, 26 June 2007 10:18

Business IT - Open Source

The first thing to do is away from the keyboard. First you must consider what you wish to achieve. What will be the aim of your distro? Possible reasons are to optimise for, or to target, a particular CPU. Alternatively, you may wish to create a highly specialised system for specific purposes.

You should also consider the default programs you would like to supply. For instance, is your preferred command-line interpreter the bash shell? Or do you prefer csh? Will you opt for sendmail for e-mail management, or do you prefer exim? Are you a vi or a pico person? One advantage of a customised Linux distribution is that it can work exactly how you want. If your aim is to provide a distro for many people to use then you will want to be flexible with your choices.

With these decisions over, the real work can begin!

The starting point to making your own Linux distro is, rather ironically, from within an existing Linux distro. This way you have all the tools you need at hand. You will also need up-to-date libraries and supporting utilities.

You may choose to use a distribution building kit - like ROCK - or you may wish to start directly from scratch. The advantage of the former approach is much of the laborious work is taken away and results can be achieved faster. However, the advantage of the latter is that the distro can be customised to far more depth and that you will have a much finer-grained understanding of the processes that have taken place.

Let's see what is involved in both of these approaches walking through both. When we considered this article, we had detailed instructions in mind. However, the full steps required are not trivial: the Linux from Scratch project, for instance, have an entire 253 page book devoted to the exercise! Therefore, we will instead give pointers to further reading and to the tools necessary - but more than that, what this article aims to do is instil in you both the inspiration to create a distro and the confidence to do it.