Guest post by PCPlus has a tutorial on building your own Linux distribution with the customizations you want, derived from Fedora, using the graphical interface called Revisor. “We’re used to thinking of Linux distributions being set in stone. They’re either KDE or Gnome, use a certain kernel and bundle certain applications. But this doesn’t have to be the case. If you find yourself making the same adjustments each time you install a new distribution, it’s worth creating your own customised version. Revisor is a tool that lets you do just this, and in this tutorial, we’ll show you how.”
Those of you who are interested in getting your hands a little dirtier might want to check this out:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
This is one of those things I’d love to tinker with if I only had more spare time.
LFS is great. Ive only completed it once because it is so timeconsuming and I cant imagine all the work it would take to keep it up to date. The biggest benefit I got out of it was to get a deeper understanding of how it works under the hood and I recommend it to everyone who has a little bit of time left over.
It is time consuming. I’ve almost got to the end. Hope to be there soon. Have learned a lot, but it’s also possible to build it like a robot, and not learn too much. So it depends on how many pauses you make to think out about what they are telling you.
The Crux distro is sort of like a stripped down LFS that’s faster to build, and then you can customize it like you want. Haven’t attempted it, but maybe next
http://crux.nu/Main/About
The part about beeing a robot is certainly true. The stuff I wasnt particulary interested in I just went through without pondering much but the more interesting bits like the init sequence – well the system configuration in general – I tried my best to grasp as well as all those tiny packages you had never heard of before that thankfully was explained to you in a very straight-forward way. Everything has some purpose to it no matter how obscure it might seem =)
Yeah, LFS *really* justifies the headline “Build your own Linux Distribution. This article is just about rolling a customised Fedora image – a useful enough feature, but hardly qualifying as creating your own distribution…
That’s all we need, more distros
Edited 2009-04-12 03:46 UTC
However, re-spinning Fedora doesn’t necessarily create a new distro.
I often create custom livecds to apply my location specific settings, latest updates and some preferred software to the image. Re-spinning also allows me to easily test out Rawhide, the development version of Fedora without installing it.
I often create custom livecds to apply my location specific settings, latest updates and some preferred software to the image. Re-spinning also allows me to easily test out Rawhide, the development version of Fedora without installing it.
I did a custom Gentoo-livecd, including all the possible drivers I could need, all the various kinds of repair utilities, support for almost all filesystems and all such. And of course, I had the desktop settings all to my personal liking so there was never need to tweak anything after booting from the cd. Been a life-saver many times
I am now considering of duplicating it on my USB-key too for faster booting and allowing me to also save stuff on the media 
I haven’t been using Gentoo for a long time, but isn’t it still one of the best ways to buid _your_ Linux. T2, Rock and maybe buildroot are also some ways to get _your_ Linux.
IMO they are a good alternative to LFS, because they are better supported, more well maintained, while LFS is more an example for a book.
But as I said, it’s been a while since I tried them all.
When you have custom apps and other things that is not included on the current distro, you need to create/re-spin your own. It happened to me in my previous company.
We have RHEL 4 as the base distro but we need the latest stable Apache/PHP/Java/Tomcat plus the custom apps. The solution is to rebuild rpms and include them in the DVD iso. Aside from the rpms/apps, drivers, partitioning, user/groups and other customizations are added in the install and post-install process.
The installer is very handy specially when you are going to deploy it to say 20-30 servers
I did do LFS and BLFS. My only problem was once I got XFCE installed and running, if I ran a command, the computer would freeze until it was done, and the system was slow. I assumed it was my kernel config and tried many reconfigs that should have allowed it to work properly and still now luck. I always ended up with a system that was slow and laggy. I even tried using the fedora config file and still got the same results. BTW on the LFS cd there is a user called JHALFS. If youve done the book or don’t have time, you can run the JHALFS program which builds each package as if you were doing it. You can pass it custom configurations and commands to make it more towards you. Takes about 8 to 12 hours on a dual core amd 64-bit machine with 4gb of ram but worked for me since I grew tired of building the system over and over. You just have to do the chapter 7 stuff from the LFS book and it’s done. Might give it a try again since LFS is on a new version.