Building Custom Slackware Distribution

[nkanthikiran]

Hi All,

I want to build a Custom Slackware Distribution for Desktop purpose. Which fits into single cd installation.

I want to change everything from the boot screen to customizing KDE to suit my needs.

Please help me how to and where I should start off for doing this.

Thank you in advance.

Kanthi Kiran

[bidi]

I'm not really sure what you're asking, but I'll take a crack at it.

Have you ever built a Linux system from scratch? If not, I'd suggest you learn that first. LFS (Linux From Scratch) is a great distribution to start with. Will take you at least a week to get it up and running, but you will learn a lot about how Linux does thing in the process. You also need to know quite a bit about programming, mostly shell programming in Slackware.

Go on tldp.org and start reading some of the HowTo's and Guides they have there. Building distributions isn't as easy as wanting to build a distro. Takes a lot of time to just get a base system, and even more getting everything up to a full on desktop environment such as KDE.

[kern]

Plenty of guides exist on how to make custom slackware installation discs

you just tailor the packages you want,

then use a script to build the ISO, you dont need custom init scripts and the like, just use the install cd ones.

copy the isolinux folder from your slackware cd to the project directory

copy 'bare.i' and place it in the 'kernels' directory

use installpkg -root=projectdir/livecd and install the packages you want to the dir in question

so your layout is

-rwxr-xr-x   1 kernow users  245 2005-09-11 18:38 create_iso.sh
drwxr-xr-x   2 kernow users 4.0K 2005-09-11 17:35 isolinux
drwxr-xr-x   2 kernow users 4.0K 2005-09-11 04:52 kernels
drwxr-xr-x  16 kernow users 4.0K 2005-09-12 01:35 live

edit isolinux/isolinux.cfg so it is as follows

default /kernels/bare.i initrd=initrd.img load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=16384 rw root
=/dev/ram SLACK_KERNEL=bare.i
prompt 0

use this to build the ISO image

echo "creating bootable iso image"
mkisofs -o ../kernos-cd.iso -R -J -hide-rr-moved -v -d -N -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 32 -boot-inf
o-table -sort isolinux/iso.sort -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/isolinux.boot .
echo "done"

hope this points you in the right direction at least.

[Nephroth]

I know this is slightly unrelated, but I intend to do something along these lines as well, only it's not really intended as a "desktop distribution" but rather just a "distribution for me."

Ultimately I'm just too lazy to select only the packages I want, and I don't want everything installed.

Contradictory? Yeah, probably.

[kern]

I know this is slightly unrelated, but I intend to do something along these lines as well, only it's not really intended as a "desktop distribution" but rather just a "distribution for me."

Ultimately I'm just too lazy to select only the packages I want, and I don't want everything installed.

Contradictory? Yeah, probably.

just install A/N/L/X/XAP packages and go from there then

they are all on the first cd too


or you could make your own disk sets I guess, I noticed my answer was more for a liveCD anyway . doh

[bidi]

just install A/N/L/X/XAP packages and go from there then

I'd go one set further and just install A, AP, L and X at first. You really only need 3 packages from the N directory: dhcp, dhcpd, tcpip, and maybe wireless-tools if you have wireless. Then from XAP you just need 1 window manager and a few apps. Might be easier to install all of XAP then uninstall what you don't want (since most of it is useful). That's usually the steps I take, and since I only have the 1st CD it works pretty well.

[kern]

I have a lot of excludes on my slackware-current rsync mirror so that its only stuff I need or use

kernow@ulysses(~)$ du /mnt/sync/slackware-current/ -sh
576M    /mnt/sync/slackware-current/
kernow@ulysses(~)$

it could be smaller I guess if I bothered removing further packages in each directory