Creating your own flavor of a distribution.

[LoafOfBread34]

Say I want to give John a distribution of Mandriva. He also wants me to include Wine to be installed when the distribution gets installed.

I want to be able to have applications to be automatically installed upon the initial installation of the product. (E.G. Add the product as a "package" that can be selected upon install.)

Is there any way to do this with limited (very little, e.g. I can echo "Hello World") C++? (I can follow tutorials well.)

Thanks for your time.

Loaf.

[ChromeBeast]

Loaf,

I have pretty much the same question. I want to create a Linux Distribution that has Samba, Apache, Webmin and any related dependencies, and be able to create and ISO and install/copy to another system

I think its going to be harder than it sounds since there are so many hardware variations. Obviously, there is a way to do it. I do not need and installer, just copy the setup I need to CD and copy to another harddrive.

May be that easy. I should try it by getting FC3 installed exactly as I want it.

I will be using pretty much the same hardware.

I have been looking a LinuxFromScratch.org, but that appears to be more of creating you own "linux" but not duplicating it.

I have a great idea that I want to implement. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I am going to try using 2 Wester Digital drives and on the first drive install and customize FC3 as I want it. Than use the WD CD that comes with the drives and do a copy of the entire drive, than put drive #2 into another system and see what happens. As long as they are both ix86 systems, should work.

Any takers on this?
Shane

[LoafOfBread34]

Yea, I am interested in actualy just adding a package into the installer, because I want to make it appear normally. I think we could benifit from some input and modify it to suit our needs though.

[jaboua]

I think there was a guide in linux journal a while ago describing how to mod knoppix and make a iso again... Maybe if you find that article you can do something similar to fedora? If not, you can try make another extra CD with a simple script which installs RPM's of the CD, and maybe copies some config-files over to /etc...

[LoafOfBread34]

Ah yea, that last idea seems easy to implement, but the user wouldnt know the difference. Could I make a install script that would just extract files into a directory? (E.G. install on my system, then look where everything is, copy it to a cd, and create a script to create the folders on the users computer and extract them to the said places. As far as I know, there is no "registry" in linux (I wanna do this with Mandriva) so it wouldnt matter if I just pasted the files into there.) Would it be possible to add entrys to the "start menu" of KDE via a script?

[jaboua]

Why can't you just make a script which asks for a root-password and then runs

su -c "./install.sh"

Then, the file install.sh installs the RPM-files from the folder "packages" in the right order (with dependencies and such)

[retired1af]

As far as I know, there is no "registry" in linux (I wanna do this with Mandriva) so it wouldnt matter if I just pasted the files into there.) Would it be possible to add entrys to the "start menu" of KDE via a script?

There may not be a registry, but each machine is unique and Linux detects these differences during the install. Just copying files and hoping it'll work most likely won't.

[LoafOfBread34]

Yea that would work. Thanks.

[Salient]

On a slightly related topic ...

I still run Windows on one of my boxes - and i use a technique called slip-streaming to integrate the latest service packs into my base XP installation and then burn it to a new installation disk (so i don't have to install the OS and all of the million's of patches seperately) ... I install XP and it's patched up to date ... it's a relatively easy process.
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase...slipstream.asp
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=295

You can also add files onto the Install disk that you want to have available to you at installation time. Anything similiar in Linux to save/create (from or to CD ROM) an updated system ... without having to recompile the kernel or apply the patches to bring systems up to date after fresh installs?

[msg43]

On a slightly related topic ...

I still run Windows on one of my boxes - and i use a technique called slip-streaming to integrate the latest service packs into my base XP installation and then burn it to a new installation disk (so i don't have to install the OS and all of the million's of patches seperately) ... I install XP and it's patched up to date ... it's a relatively easy process.
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase...slipstream.asp
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=295

You can also add files onto the Install disk that you want to have available to you at installation time. Anything similiar in Linux to save/create (from or to CD ROM) an updated system ... without having to recompile the kernel or apply the patches to bring systems up to date after fresh installs?

not that I'm aware of but Salient there a program called nlite and you can also remove stuff from the windows cd (sorry it offtopic I know)
I would just make a script that would execute the commands for installing binary or compiling from source