Linux Build your own Linux!

[Him Her]

While I'm waiting to get my hands on a Raspberry pi I thought I'd have a nosy at what is supported in the OS.

It appears that the pi will ship with Fedora Remix, at least initially, or, as it turns out a Fedora Remix - there's potentially loads of them. Anyway a quick look for what a 'remix' is turned up some interesting stuff. Apart from the mainstream distribution there's a 'Spin' and 'Remix'. A 'spin' is 100% Fedora code while a 'remix' can include 3rd party code. Additionally, a 'remix' can have your own logos applied - so you can build your own systems, apply your own logos and you're limited by your imagination really.

Even better, there are tools from Fedora to simplify the whole process. Cool!

This means you can mod the pi with your own remix and include your own configs etc. This wiki gives more details.

There's an Ubuntu toolkit too here.

What if you don't want a pi? You can use these tools to create tailored Live CD/USB/DVD installations.

Magic! A completely customisable OS

 

[Him Her]

Further to the previous comment...

...this being Linux world there's a degree of engineering you have to do yourself so it's not quite as easy as it may first appear! Because I have quite a bit of experience with Ubuntu I decided to do some tests with the configuration kit available in this disty. It was not without a degree of pain but nothing insurmountable. However, while building a bootable image is essentially the same whichever version of Linux you prefer there are some gotchas...

There are numerous distys but they can often be grouped together i.e. Ubuntu, Debian and Mint use the same base i.e. kernel, packages and file structure. Fedora has some variations and leans more towards the original BSD. That means you would have to build your image on a machine running the same OS as the target. In the case of the pi it will ship with a Fedora Remix on a 2Gb SD flash card (according to reports). While you could manually build such as the principles are the same whatever the Linux variant, it's a load easier to use the tools provided. So you should build on a Fedora platform.

I haven't been able to discover whether the remix that will ship with the pi, if converted to an ISO (easy enough) would have all the relevant elements to use as a seed. The seed ISO is used as the basis of the new build. It SHOULD have a package manager and console. Without these it will be difficult to configure the resulting ISO as the whole process occurs in a 'guest' i.e. using the Package Manager on the host machine won't work as it will install the changes on the host and not in the guest (where it should be).

I'm still figuring out how a lot of this actually works so any Linux gurus please comment - I have a headache

 

[cooler]

How far did you get with this?

I know you can down load img files but doing it your self, epically ubuntu is better.

 

[Him Her]

Not a great deal further TBH - got a bit busy