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Installers for Homebrew Linux Distributions?

Posted by Cliff on from the building-on-what's-already-out-there dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "With the relatively easy instructions available from various sources (LSF being one), it's fairly easy now for just about any relatively advanced Linux user to create their own distro. I'm well into creating a distribution (for my friends and myself, nothing major), but I can't seem to find any real projects out there to actually go through an installation process. Anaconda is there, but the lack of documentation is serious. Are there any others out there? If not, what would be required to create one? An obvious start would be a stripped down, bootable Linux CD, and an application to handle partitioning, formatting, setting up the filesystem, and installing packages (of whatever sort), but what all has been done before?"

5 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. KNOPPIX is a good start... by ubiquitin · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...and the article Custom Debian CD from Knoppix tells you how.

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    http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
  2. Re:LFS by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think he mentioned he wanted an installation process.

    I think a good candidate might be ALFS - the Automated Linux From Scratch. Also remember that LFS only gets you a barebones system that's not really all that usable except to start installing software onto, so you'll need to also check out the 'Beyond LFS' project to get a usable desktop system, if that's what you're after.

    If your 'distribution' won't be 'customizable', then just make the CD bootable and copy the setup or a disk image onto the HD.

  3. Slinky by himynameisbrak · · Score: 3, Informative

    The RULE Project provides a simple installer using Bash scripts. It is highly modifiable. It uses very little RAM, which allows it to fulfill its primary purpose, that being to enable the most recent Red Hat Linux distributions to be installed on low-end hardware. They call their lean 'n' mean installer Slinky. It is currently under active development and probably could still use some usability improvements, but it is a fully-functional installer with minimal overhead.

  4. GLIS by Higman · · Score: 3, Informative

    GLIS is an installer for Gentoo. Since the Gentoo install is pretty manual, this might be generic enough for your needs.

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  5. Damn Small Linux and bootable business card by ubiquitin · · Score: 1, Informative

    If you are facing size restrictions (older, smaller hard drives) or wanting to work with smart-card-bootable systems, check out: Damn Small Linux which fits everything into less than 50 megabytes, as does the bootable business card distro.

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    http://tinyurl.com/4ny52