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/ Hathaway Weblog / How to Make Your Own Linux Distribution |
Here is a good way to make a Linux distribution for your family and friends.
Rationale
You may be asking, why would you want to build a Linux distribution for your family and friends? Why do we need more distributions? Well, I want my friends to experience the state of the art, continually. If they install Fedora, Mandrake, or some other classic distribution, they will be up to date for only a short time. They'll get security updates, but only a few new features until the next release of the distribution, and even then, each major upgrade may cost money and will probably introduce new bugs that you have to deal with all at once. Distributors add a lot of branding, so my friends will experience the Fedora brand or the Mandrake brand rather than the presentation intended by the original software authors.
If you make your own distribution, you can keep your friends up to date with the free software packages they like most (including security updates, bugfixes, and feature upgrades) without time-consuming major upgrade cycles. You can keep the original branding, since you don't need to make money. The point is that you can make choices appropriate for your group of friends rather than hope some major Linux distributor happens to make the choices you would.
It's important to keep your time commitment to a minimum. If you have to spend more than an hour or two per week on this project, you'll eventually give up the project or be forced to ask for money. You can't do this for a large number of people, either, because the more people involved, the more their choices will diverge and the more generic you'll have to make your distribution.
Gentoo to the Rescue
So here's what you do: on a server, build and configure a full Gentoo Linux system in a chroot jail, building binary packages for everything as you go (emerge --buildpkg or "quickpkg".) The jail creates a barrier that allows you to make different configuration choices for your friends' systems and for your server.
Now, this is nothing new. Using a jail is the standard way to set up a Gentoo system. However, the idea that never occurred to me before is that you can also use a jail to keep your friends' systems up to date. In effect, you can have multiple Gentoo installations on a single system, all with different configurations, with no risk of installations reading or writing each other's files. No virtual machines required.
Your friends' computers should use your server as their "emerge sync" source. They should also keep the following files/directories in sync with the jail in your server, using rsync: /usr/portage/packages, /etc/make.conf, /etc/make.profile, /etc/profile. There may be others. Keep in mind that since you're building binary packages, you have to manage USE flags for them.
Not Quite Finished
Unfortunately, there's still a missing piece in this puzzle: you have to manage the other configuration files in /etc. You could run etc-update on your friends' computers, but that could take a fair amount of time. I'm still trying to think of a way to manage configuration files. If that detail gets fixed somehow, 2005 could be the year we see the emergence of "neighborhood" Linux distributors.
Comments
I was thinking about a linux distribution that could be useful to people who get stuck in the tribulation. I was thinking it could be called Tribulation Linux or Tribulinux or something similar. And it probably wouldn't need alot of software, just a wallpaper that says do not take the mark on your hand or your forehead no matter what, turn to Jesus as your Lord and savior, and be faithful even under the threat of death by men, so that you can escape God's judgment and the eternal death to come, and receive eternal life with God. They especially need to know not to take that mark, because it's too late for them after that. There is no way to be saved or redeemed or justified if anyone takes the mark. Perhaps such a distribution could be announced at distrowatch.com where alot of people could see it, and they will especially need it if the rapture happens and they are left out. But since I have never built a linux distro, maybe this is something someone else out there may want to do.
Um, yeah, good luck to you on that, Ted, assuming you don't get struck by lightning for doing it. ;-)
Have you looked into LSF(Linux From Scratch)? Thought I might give it a try.
So, what purpose does creating a paranoid religious survivalist linux distribution have? Producing such a thing only seeks to create paranoia among the hyper-religious people in our world. Nothing else would come of it. If your tribulation should occur, linux is the least of people's thoughts, and using one's computer would probably not be any sort of thought in one's mind.
