I want some geeks experience here!

[sky_knight02]

Hello,
Im representing a students group here and we are planning to build a OS from scratch, we just need to know what are the problems we may face in the future by building an OS from scratch.

Thanks in advance....

Im here cause who knows OS better than programming geeks.
Please give as much inputs as possible.

Welkin

[techieMoe]

The Linux from Scratch project is a good place to start. Slightly easier would be to set up an install of Gentoo Linux. Either one will teach you more than you ever wanted to know about how Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems work.

[sky_knight02]

Thankyou for your reply, we finished having experiencing LFS we got good experience and knowledge and playing with Make file, we would like to know the future problems we would be facing if we build an OS from scratch.
As we are building it from source we know that it will produce more bugs when more packages woks together, and developed popular distros might already come accross this situations and as they have a big amount of contributers and full time dedicated developers it can be solved quickly but we are students with having studies in one hand and OS in other so we like to know the negatives if we start a distro as mentioned earlier

Thank you

[Jonathan183]

It depends what the distro is for ...
patching security threats and keeping existing packages up to date is likely to be an issue for you ... the more packages you install ... the worse it will get.

If this is a homework question ... you should be answering it yourself ... if your thinking of setting up your own distro then you should research this yourself. Maybe you should give us a list of issues you have identified and ask if there are other things we can think of. You also need to give a good indication what the distro is going to be used for.

[sky_knight02]

Thanks for your reply,

This is not homework question and we are pretty involved us to build an OS for students by students which will be educative by the means of solving problems like bugs.
As for as our knowlege we expected
many bugs as many packages works together as you said
supporting hardware and various archs.
and testing, we can do it by vitualization eventough it is much difficult to support many archs.
Thats all for now,

[L4Linux]

Making a succesful distibution is quite hard, because it needs a strong community of developers & testers and/or full time paid developers. And until your distro becomes popoular, it will be difficult to have a strong community...It's kind of a loophole. Most popular distributions have sponsors with big wallets. OpenSuse from Novell, Fedora from Red Hat, Ubuntu from Canonical and their success led to a growing community. You can contribute to other distributions or open source projects and your work will benefit all of us

[sky_knight02]

Thanks for your reply,
As we are students we are expecting supports from our local students.
our moto is not popularising, is to build a bug free distro with students, and we are working towards it, for past 3 monts.
We are indeed love to contribute to opensource and to other distros, by building our OS and clearing bugs. we will try to make it unique in future.

[L4Linux]

Nothing is ever going to be bug-free. Even Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse or any proprietary OS (Windows, Mac, Solaris,etc..) with hundrends of developers and countless beta testers have (a lot of) bugs. But whenever you send your bug-fixes upstream to the corresponding projects, while developing your distro, you will have helped a lot.

[Jonathan183]

Personally I think you would be better using a source based distro like Gentoo and develop/refine apllications to suit students instead. You get a stable base, have control over what gets compiled and how, have the advantage of a package manager - and can spend your effort on the applications you consider important.

[Surak]

When the OS Gets bigger, expect problems you cant easily find the cause of, i made a joint OS with a mate, and well, it wasnt easy to say the least.