Well, here goes the answer - "Linux from scratch". 
Yup, LFS is the name of the project that could help you with building your own Linux Distro. The way Fedora, Redhat, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, DSL and other Distro's are released, we could also create our own Distro.
Yup, LFS is the name of the project that could help you with building your own Linux Distro. The way Fedora, Redhat, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, DSL and other Distro's are released, we could also create our own Distro.
I have personally not created an entirely new Distro. However, I have done similar exercise in my previous company. - Gentoo installation. Yes, installing Gentoo is equivalent to building you own Linux.
So why am I sharing it now? Good question. Going via the Unix philosophy - Keep it simple stupid; I remembered my Gentoo venture today and thought of sharing my experience.
Following is a very brief explanation of the activities there were performed. For deta
ils, refer to the Gentoo Linux Installation handbook; and yes, you gotta know your system well, coz the installation is specific to your system only and you need to understand components of your system well. This includes the microprocessor, hard disk and its type, graphics card and similar other details.
ils, refer to the Gentoo Linux Installation handbook; and yes, you gotta know your system well, coz the installation is specific to your system only and you need to understand components of your system well. This includes the microprocessor, hard disk and its type, graphics card and similar other details.Steps:
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1. Downloading the stage 3 tar ball.
2. Compiling and Installing Gentoo base system. Once stage3 tarball is compiled and installed, you can use basic linux commands like ifconfig, fdisk etc. We can now go ahead and partition the disk.
3. Creating Linux partitions on my external hard disk and formatting them with appropriate FileSystem (I don't exactly remember which one I used, however it was either ext3 or reiserfs).
3. Creating Linux partitions on my external hard disk and formatting them with appropriate FileSystem (I don't exactly remember which one I used, however it was either ext3 or reiserfs).
4. Choosing the Kernel (yes, Gentoo offers more than one Kernel's ), downloading and compiling the same on my system.
5. Configuring the Kernel . This step is quite important in optimizing the performance of the system.
6. Choosing the Boot Loader. (Grub is the default, but you could choose Lilo as well - I used Grub).
7. Finalizing the Gentoo Installation. (Now you have a CLI based Gentoo system running).
You might be wondering, why the heck did I do all this, when everything is available in a single distro?
Well, we could pick either one and get started with the same, however there are 3 main reasons for this activity.
a) I wanted to get acquainted with Gentoo since we used it professionally.
b) I wanted to explore the sys internals and see how components work
c) Third but not the least, getting a system that boots and shuts down quickly and is light weight :)b) I wanted to explore the sys internals and see how components work
I was not successful in configuring the system for wireless network. For wireless, I had to use the NDIS wrapper, but somehow due to one or the other reason, I wasn't able to get it running.
It was interesting and anybody interested in something more than just superficial knowledge, should install Gentoo at least once. I faced multiple problems including the Kernel panic's :P , however finally managed to learn something. I am thankful to Pavan for helping me getting out of the pitfalls during this installation.
