Re: [LUG] Creating a GNU/Linux environment from scratch

[Robin Cornelius <robin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeremy Pearson wrote:

> I'd like to create a GNU/Linux environment from scratch, in effect
> creating my own personal distribution, for lots of interesting reasons,
> but mainly to see what's involved and to further my understanding of how
> everything works. I suppose I'm a purist (masochist?!) at heart.
>
> I imagine the process would generally be:
>
> 1) Boot from Live CD to partition the hard drive
> 2) Download the kernel source & compile it
> 3) Add in any necessary device drivers
>  
Every thing is fairly easy to this point and i assume extra device 
drivers you mean extra non included modules so these could be built for 
a non running kernel without too much trouble.

> 4) Download goodness-knows-how-many basic GNU tools like "ls", "cat",
> "more" etc.
>  
This is where you have to be careful, don't forget all the dependencies 
such as dynamic libaries, you can look at each commands dependencies 
individualy using ldd i think.

You then need some sort of init scripts, to set up and load everything 
correctly for you. If i recall the kernel process spawns of init the 
master process. It is possible to run other things instead of init using 
the kernel parameter init=/bin/sh for example, but in most cases you 
will want init to run and then create sutible scripts for init to set 
things up.  You could take a lot of short cuts as most scripts are 
designed for portability and flexibility but you could *hard code* many 
things.

Then it is a case of getting your basic shell environment correct so 
that you can do stuff such as compile etc.

Robin



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