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Building a Personal Distribution: Take II

From Seymour Cakes on Mon, 29 Mar 1999

I know building a personal distribution is no two or three paragraph thing, but I really want to know how to do it. Won't it be nice if anybody can have a personal distribution of their own.

It is nice that anybody can have their own personal distribution. But what does that MEAN!

If you take Red Hat, add a couple of your favorite packages (RPMs from it's contrib directory, for example and may some crypto RPMs from Replay http://www.replay.com) ... is that a new distribution?

Mandrake is derived from Red Hat. I haven't used it personally but it seems that they've added a significant amount of additional work.

At what point is something sufficient divergent that you would call it a new distribution?

It's a moot question.

There's no "how to do it" because you can't clearly define "it."

What I would call a "new distribution" would take an immense amount of work and expertise (beyond my own).

I would be more than happy if anyone could send some links or pointer or something.

Start with the LDP (http://www.metalab.unc.edu/LDP) After you've read EVERYTHING there you'll have a good idea of "how to do it" (for almost any concievable "it" in the Linux world).

Sey.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 41 May 1999

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