[Cialug] Custom distro CD's

[Josh More]

Frankly, it's best to learn the paradigm of what you're rebuilding,
otherwise you're creating a support nightmare for yourself in the
future.  You can do a source-file distribution if you want, using Linux
>From Scratch, but stop for a moment and ask yourself these questions:

1) Are the people who run Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva, Debian, and Ubuntu
intelligent?
2) Is there a reason that every single one of the major players uses
some form of packaging?
3) Do those reasons apply to your project?

Given what you're doing, I'd do a simplified CentOS install.  It'll be
free, reasonably supported for the future, and fairly easy to do.  The
only hard part would be turning some of those perl modules into RPMs,
but these links will help:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpan2rpm/
http://weidner.in-bad-schmiedeberg.de/computer/linux/rpm/cpanflute.html

See, if you go with a CentOS system, you can leave the default yum
configs in place, and add one of your own to handle your custom stuff. 
Then the systems can stay secure with a minimum of effort on your part. 
If you go with source files, than security updates require you rolling
new CDs for every update.  The CentOS guys on #centos on freenode are
also quite helpful.


 

-- 
-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701


>>> "Matt" <cialug at flash.shanje.com> 01/30/07 10:01 AM >>> 
Is there any chance that there are easy ways to do it using CVS, or
just
source files?  The specialized distro CD that I'm trying to build will
basically be perl, some perl modules, SpamAssassin (SpamD) and ClamAV
(ClamD).  All I'm doing is SPAM filtering with these systems, and I
want
an easy way to rebuild or deploy new boxes.  I'd also like to
eventually
release this to the internet at large for people to download and use
at
their leisure.  SpamAssassin seems to work best under *nix, so that's
why I'm doing it this way, but setting up and configuring a system to
do
that and only that is more than many people are capable of.  Figured
this would be a nice treat for them.

Also -  any chance that anyone would be willing to sit down for a
couple
of hours and help me poke at this?  Like I said previously, I'm not
super well versed in the *nix world, and a few hours of pointers would
go a long way to helping this get off the ground.  Case of beer, cash,
or other prizes would be offered :)

- Matt

PS -  in any event, thanks for the link -  the stuff I've found for
FreeBSD is cryptic enough that I still haven't really been able to
make
heads or tails of it.  Those tips are already a better start for some
of
these other distro's than what I've got for FreeBSD.


----- Original Message-----
From: cialug- bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug- bounces at cialug.org]
On
Behalf Of Josh More
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 9:52 AM
To: cialug at cialug.org
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Custom distro CD's

I did this a few years ago in the Red Hat world. There, it was pretty
simple.  I used RH9 (later, CentOS) as a base.

The build was pretty.  You start with this:  
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/howto.html and tweak as you go.

If I recall, you need to rebuild your packages as RPMs, build the
appropriate file structure, rebuild comps.xml, repackage everything,
adjust the installer as needed.  For mine, I mostly stripped out
unneeded stuff to shrink it down to a single CD.  Then I added some
things from RPMForge, and modified the kickstart file to do a complete
and automated install.

I've also hacked on Knoppix, which is pretty easy.  There are loads of
resources in google.  "rebuilding knoppix" are good keywords.

You can also make a custom distro based on SUSE pretty easily.  Your
keyword there is "autoyast".

The best advice I can give is that, whatever you choose as a base,
work
within that paradigm.  In other worlds, if you're forking RedHat or
SUSE, make sure everything is an RPM and use kickstart/autoyast.  If
you're forking a debian- based system, use .deb files.  If you're
forking
Gentoo, be sure to have a few books to read as you compile.

*grin*

Hope this helps,




 

--  
- Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515- 245- 7701


>>> "Matt" <cialug at flash.shanje.com> 01/30/07 9:42 AM >>> 
Does anyone have any clue how to build them?  I've got a project that
I'm working on, and while I'm decent at using *nix (FreeBSD right now)
I'm not well enough versed to really know how to go about making a
_very_ custom distro CD.  Does anyone have any good resources for
making
CD's, or would anyone have time to help a *nix newbie figure this out?
 
-  Matt Breitbach

_______________________________________________
Cialug mailing list
Cialug at cialug.org
http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug


_______________________________________________
Cialug mailing list
Cialug at cialug.org
http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug