Making a Linux Distro

[Stefann]

Hey all, you know, I've been thinking recently. There is now a huge variety of Linux distro's out there, and they all still have one thing in common: they all are tailored (well, the mainstream ones at least) for either newbies, or experts. Now, I recently got Gentoo Stage 3 on my system, got GNOME and a few other goodies compilied, and I'm starting to feel squashed by the compile times on my 600MhZ Celeron Coppermine system, but I like being able to choose WHAT to compile in, but not have to mess with tarballs and ./configure's myself, I love my USE flags. But I am missing the polish and ease of use(yes, I can navigate Gentoo just fine, I know my config files, etc.) of Ubuntu, mainly I miss everything 'just working', I can't even get x11-drm to compile correctly, I get error messages about some function in a source file and it quits, and yes I had everything set correctly. But all of that is besides the point. What I really think we need, is a new distro with polish and ease of use, but at the same time is flexibe and lets you dig down and mess with it. Now that may sound like a lot of distro's out there, but I really want that ONE distro that I can have all the pretty eyecandy and artwork, but I also want one that has the flexibility of Gentoo(especially it's config files, thinking of the Ubuntu/Debian network configs and startup scripts scares me now), but without the compile times, simply because they take forever, I like choosing what I want in my software(seriously, optimization does almost nothing, the biggest advantage of gentoo is YOU decide what you want in your software, not what the package creator thought what was best), but I'd rather have a little bloat and skip the compile times. Now(aside from Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, or any other RPM based distros), can someone either point me to such a distro, or assist me in making one? I already have ideas buzzing in my head for such a distro, but a large lack of knowledge on how to make a distro, and C/++ skills. Well anyways..

[truoc444]

i have a Pentium 166 Mhz Panasonic toughbook with 64 MB Ram that Runs Debian quite well. (i couldn't run gnome very well, but xfce flies) then again there's always linux from scratch if you really want to get your hands dirty. personally i'll still with the more streamlined systems.

[budman7]

I would go with Arch if I were you.
Customize it the way you want.
And pac-man is great, no compile times to worry about.

[fingal]

I also think you might try Linux from Scratch (LFS). It sounds like you want to get inside things a big more ... your learning curve would be huge, but isn't that what you want?

[Weedman]

I forward fingal's suggestion of lfs.

If you have emerged software with gentoo, then you will already have all of the source files from the emerged software in /usr/portage/distfiles.

I can't say whether it's good or bad, as I need to try it myself

~the weedman

[Kojak]

Arch, Slackware, Frugalware, Yoper, Foresight or LFS are some nice options. If you think of making your own distro, I suggest you better join an existing project. It is usually better to share manpower than to try to handle everything yourself. And many projects seriously lack manpower.

[Dapper Dan]

I read all of your post and thought to myself that everything you describe you're looking for except one can be found in Slackware. The only thing is, what you say about, "not what the package creator thought what was best." Patrick Volkerding certainly includes the packages he believes are best in Slackware, but I think any maintainer worth his weight would do the same thing. I think you'd like the fact that Slackware doesn't provide a lot of fancy gui configuration utilities. It is a concrete part of the Slackware philosophy to edit and configure your distro to your needs via the cli. Slackware is the only distro I've ever used, (and I've used all the major ones including Gentoo) that I couldn't break to the point where I couldn't fix it. A big advantage is you can install it in about an hour.

[bryansmith]

I also vote for Arch. You can install a base system and work your way up with a binary package management system. You can also use a ports like system should you want to tweak compile options.

Bryan