places where you can build your own linux

This board posts about running linux on your webdt366
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quotaholic
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places where you can build your own linux

Post by quotaholic »

Two places that I know of so far are:

http://custom.nimblex.net

and

http://susestudio.com/

Suse Studio is in alpha stages right now. Its quite comprehensive allowing you to chose from text only, minimal x server, and two other base templates to build upon. From there add the packages you want from category or search group. Even the desktop environment. Suse Studio allows one to build the image on their server, as well as test the image through your own web browser (very impressive! they even put browser buttons up for F1 - F12 keys). This is done though a vncview of some kind. After you done building it you get choices as to what format you wnat to download your image in.

Suse Studio is the most comprehensive build service I have seen. Watch the demo movie on their site and sign up for the alpha program. I have built a 220 megabyte minimal x image with a lightweight desktop but I screwed up and grabbed the wrong kernel. I have to wait a period of time before building another so pick and choose carefully if you do get that far.

quotaholic
Last edited by quotaholic on Thu Mar 26, 2009 6:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
gillespiem
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Re: places where you can build your own linux

Post by gillespiem »

Based on the fact that you only have ~500M of storage on the webdt 366 (if you don't add a Compact Flash card, which I ended up doing), your best bet is probably to generate your own linux filesystem by hand, selecting only the very basic items that you need.

I'm currently working on a minimalistic Gentoo filesystem. Since the WebDT is an x86 processor, building software is fairly easy, no cross-compiling necessary. Initially I was hoping to build a ~500M image, but have actually given that up for the time being.

Also, looks like the pennmount drivers aren't really well supported. Newer versions of x11 don't play friendly yet... and I'm not sure when penmount actually updated their drivers last (and a little too lazy to look right now). I have been able to compile working drivers by dropping back to xf86-input-pennmount-1.2.0, and rolling back inputproto and a few other x11 libraries to former versions. Right now I'm battling with display issues in X, and will hopefully have that resolved soon.

Hopefully I'll release a beta in the next few weeks. If you haven't seen the LinuxMCE orbiter image, and are planning on building your own image, I suggest you look there first. Thom has done a great deal of work already.
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