[Cialug] Custom distro CD's

[Josh More]

I did this a few years ago in the Red Hat world. There, it was pretty
simple.  I used RH9 (later, CentOS) as a base.

The build was pretty.  You start with this:  
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/howto.html and tweak as you go.

If I recall, you need to rebuild your packages as RPMs, build the
appropriate file structure, rebuild comps.xml, repackage everything,
adjust the installer as needed.  For mine, I mostly stripped out
unneeded stuff to shrink it down to a single CD.  Then I added some
things from RPMForge, and modified the kickstart file to do a complete
and automated install.

I've also hacked on Knoppix, which is pretty easy.  There are loads of
resources in google.  "rebuilding knoppix" are good keywords.

You can also make a custom distro based on SUSE pretty easily.  Your
keyword there is "autoyast".

The best advice I can give is that, whatever you choose as a base, work
within that paradigm.  In other worlds, if you're forking RedHat or
SUSE, make sure everything is an RPM and use kickstart/autoyast.  If
you're forking a debian-based system, use .deb files.  If you're forking
Gentoo, be sure to have a few books to read as you compile.

*grin*

Hope this helps,




 

-- 
-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701


>>> "Matt" <cialug at flash.shanje.com> 01/30/07 9:42 AM >>> 
Does anyone have any clue how to build them?  I've got a project that
I'm working on, and while I'm decent at using *nix (FreeBSD right now)
I'm not well enough versed to really know how to go about making a
_very_ custom distro CD.  Does anyone have any good resources for
making
CD's, or would anyone have time to help a *nix newbie figure this out?
 
- Matt Breitbach