Obsidian - My Linux Distro

[Spectere]

I've been hammering a Linux distro together for the past few months and, prior to building the package manager, decided to toss up a blog.

Here be link: http://obsidian.spectere.net/wordpress/

Perhaps one of yous guys will find it interesting.

[Sqthreer!]

Whoa. I don't know much about Linux, but your own distribution? SHIT SON that's awesome Cool name, too.

What exactly entails creating your own Linux distro, and how is it different than others and whatnot?

[Spectere]

Thanks.

Basically, what you have to do is compile all of the core utilities from within another Linux system.  Basically, you need to make sure that you have the core libraries (glibc), the userspace utilities (coreutils) so you can navigate directories and manipulate files.  After you manage to get a "functional" system together, you have to build all of the utilities necessary to build packages from source without relying on the base system.

That's pretty much where I am now.  My objective now is to build a package manager to build and install package automatically, taking most of the drudge work out of maintaining the system.

[Sqthreer!]

I totally didn't get any of that, but it sounds really intense.

[Spectere]

Haha, it is.

[Bobbias]

Holy crap. I guess this is going forward because you actually have free time now?

[Spectere]

Sorta.

Work's been unsteady as ever, but this lull that I've had in the past week has given me a lot of time to think about what needs to be done with the project.

I've had the system in a bootable state (as in, I can boot a Linux kernel using GRUB, get to bash, and work on the system) for quite some time, but it's still in a very bare state.  I have any sort of init in place yet.  I have upstart built and ready to go as of a few days ago, I just need to hammer together some init scripts so that the system can automatically mount the root volume as read-write, mount the drives in fstab, and do all of that other fun startup stuff.  I've just been passing init=/bin/bash to the kernel for now.

And, of course, the package system.  I've been writing notes and stuff for that periodically for the last few months and, after throwing about three attempts worth in the trash, I think I have a good idea of what needs to be done.  Right now I'm at the point where I'm trying to determine what the best way to implement it would be.