On Sat, 2005-10-22 at 07:30, Claude Jones wrote: > I've been looking, and there are lots of pages on how to create a distro. > Sometimes, it's hard to separate the competent from the wannabes. Do any of > you who have actually created distros have some reading suggestions for a > beginner? The k12ltsp project rebuilds the fedora and Centos distributions with addition packages and install options. The procedure must work well because their rebuilt isos have always been available very soon after the underlying code releases and included all base system updates up to the time of the rebuild. See http://www.k12ltsp.org/phpwiki/index.php/Technical%3ADeveloper%3ABuildHowto for the procedure. > I'm interested in creating a distro that is oriented to graphics > artists/media professionals - that comes up with the cutting edge packages > that are being developed, installed and basically configured, and provides > easy methods for keeping those packages updated as they develop. I'm thinking > of packages like Cinelerra, Jahshaka, Cinepaint, etc, when I say cutting > edge, though I'm also open to any suggestions on this front. Packages like > Inkscape, and the Gimp would be fairly simple to include, I presume. I'm > welcome to being told, also, that this is too ambitious, but if you could > give reasons for why this is so, that would be great. Note that you really don't have to rebuild the base disto to add packages. You can just put the new packages and any modified base libraries in a yum repository, add those to the client yum configuration after installation and issue a 'yum install ...' command. Subsequent yum updates will also do the right thing. There are already several such repositories on the net. However, it is a nice touch to have a canned package group on the install set and a yum preconfigured for the additional repository like the k12ltsp version does it. If you see any educational value in the packages you want to add, maybe you should combine forces and maintain packages to for that distro. Inkscape and scribus are already there and the ltsp part (to netboot thin clients) doesn't hurt anything even if you don't use it. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
