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Build yourself a Linux

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Re: Build yourself a Linux

#61

Post by slezyr »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #56

I have a question related to this article, though not directly. If building completely from scratch turns out too cumbersome and time-consuming, what would be the easiest way of building a minimal, fast starting distro with graphical user interface and networking whose only purpose is to run one application on x86 hardware in kiosk mode? Is there a distro builder for dummies?

https://susestudio.com/ (NOT REALY WHAT YOU WANT)

You can pick packages and build a distro from browser.

NixOS - You can make one config file to specify how your system should look like. It's easy to make GUI for it.

Re: Build yourself a Linux

#62

Post by agumonkey »

qb45 wrote: post #53
duncan_bayne wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the recommended tools don't change every few months ;)

Yeah, pmount, hal, ivman, udisks, consolekit, consolekit2, policykit, upstart, systemd, oss, alsa, pulseaudio, xfree, xorg, wayland, mir, kms, gtk, gtk2, gtk3, qt9, motif, unity, loadlin, lilo, grub, grub2, ghtml, webkit, qtwebkit, webkitgtk, webkitgtk2... I guess you're right, they change only every few years :)

That's why my setup (arch) was as bare as possible. kernel, grub, x, wmii, emacs, chrome, ffmpeg and mpv. With time it grew alas.

Re: Build yourself a Linux

#64

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

willtim wrote: post #46
digi_owl wrote: post #6

Both this and LFS reminds me that Linux makes sense until you get the DEs involved. At that point shit just sprawls all over the place as there are no longer any notion of layers.

I'm running i3, polybar, connman and rofi as my Linux desktop environment and its very productive, configurable, lightweight and reliable. My only worry is that one day I'll be forced to move to something akin to what you describe. I blame object-oriented programmers.

I found it strange that the comment you replied to complained about 'not enough layers'. That sounds like a benefit to me!

Re: Build yourself a Linux

#65

Post by qb45 »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #57
qb45 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, pmount, hal, ivman, udisks, consolekit, consolekit2, policykit, upstart, systemd, oss, alsa, pulseaudio, xfree, xorg, wayland, mir, kms, gtk, gtk2, gtk3, qt9, motif, unity, loadlin, lilo, grub, grub2, ghtml, webkit, qtwebkit, webkitgtk, webkitgtk2... I guess you're right, they change only every few years :)

He did say almost as complicated ;) (Also: QuickBASIC 4.5 forever! Assuming that's the meaning of your nick).

Yep, that's what got me started on programming as a kid. And it still has better strings and arrays than C.

Re: Build yourself a Linux

#66

Post by Nullabillity »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #56

I have a question related to this article, though not directly. If building completely from scratch turns out too cumbersome and time-consuming, what would be the easiest way of building a minimal, fast starting distro with graphical user interface and networking whose only purpose is to run one application on x86 hardware in kiosk mode? Is there a distro builder for dummies?

NixOS is awesome for stuff like this. Very easy to define your own "base image" and layer whatever you want on top of it. Binary packages by default, but you can override the compilation flags for any any package, Gentoo-style. Configuration files are also packages, which frees you from the cruft that systems like Chef or Puppet tend to accumulate.

Oh, and NixOps is awesome for managing multiple machines. And it can automagically set up VMs corresponding to your production network.

SUSE Studio has a nice GUI and is easy to get started with, but AFAIK it doesn't have a nice story for configuration management, or managing the systems after they've been deployed.

Re: Build yourself a Linux

#67

Post by michielderhaeg »

erikb wrote: post #9

I really wondered what's so special about this project that aims to achieve what probably more projects aimed to achieved than there are lines of code in the kernel. It's not the goal, it's not the OS. But the documentation is a sight to behold! Very clear, detailed, interesting writing style, and it puts together quite a few frustrating topics in a simple, structured matter. Wow and kudos! Keep on writing docs, plea…

Your kind words are much appreciated. Many people seem to indeed be missing the point. I wasn't trying to create a new distro, I'm just trying to teach people in a way so that it would just take a few hours of your time.

Re: Build yourself a Linux

#69

Post by yebyen »

albertzeyer wrote: post #55
ddevault wrote: post #33

Building a Linux distro from scratch has been one of the most tasking projects I've attempted. There are two phases: the frustration phase, and the tedious phase. Bootstrapping it is an incredibly frustrating process - I restarted from scratch 5 times before any attempt ever got to the tedious phase. The tedious phase never ends. You have to make hundreds of packages to get to a usable desktop system. I've made 407 p…

I'm just curious: In what way is it rewarding? Just for educational purpose? Or anything else? Or is it just a hobby? I mean, you are probably investing a lot of time into this. This time you could spend on other things instead. I see the educational purpose. Although you probably get similar experience/understanding/education if you use something like Gentoo and you would have to invest much less time because all th…

> invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of

I'm certain (because I learned with Slackware before there was Gentoo) that those nasty corner cases are actually where the rewarding part is. The progression of distros for me was, ZipSlack (fit on a 100MB Zip Disk), Red Hat, Mandrake, then back to Slackware once I actually had a real decent internet connection, and I can say for sure that dealing with those naturally occurring corner cases was a lot more fun than dealing with those "it's packaged, but for a different version of RedHat, so it won't work on your Mandrake install"

Eventually I switched to Debian and was able to just stop caring about that stuff for the most part until something was too fresh to find a package.

(I'd run Unstable, and everything was either packaged already or the vast majority of the dependencies were already packaged.)

I don't know if there was any tangible reward from learning to build Enlightenment, and a full stack of graphical libraries underneath, but at least I did get Enlightenment from it. (!!)

Re: Build yourself a Linux

#70

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

sq_ wrote: post #43
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made several compromises so far. I've been making a note of them with the expectation (or hope) that I'll get to them, or a bright eyed new contributor might (I have some of those :D).

Do you have a Github repo or something similar for the distro? I'd love to see it if you do.

https://agunix.org
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