[syslinux] Looking for info
James Alan Brown
James at jabcomp.force9.co.uk
Fri Jan 25 12:14:42 PST 2002
Dear All,
This may at first seem a bit odd but I
am hopping to find some info that I feel
would help the Linux community as a whole.
With so many different flavours of Linux
and with each distribution doing their own
thing there doesn't seem to be any easy way
to create a Linux install on a new virgin
PC without committing oneself to a
"Brand Name" (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake
Debian Slackware or other).
Each Brand has its good points as well
as it bad points and it is not until you
start writing C programs for Linux that
you soon realise there exists a total screw
up with RPM's added "dif files" that change
the config of pure tar source files to
suite the Brands likes/dislikes of the
LSB (Linux Standard Base).
What I would like to do is to produce a
bootable (Linux) CD that has a directory
of tools to partition a new hard drive,
format, probe your hardware, install a
kernel,set up a base system with a Bash
Shell and a C++ compiler. Giving the end
user an easy way of building up a custom
"Brand Free System".
I have looked hard on the net at mini-Linux/
Linux from scratch corelinux and endless
others but most seem to be so complex or
require you to have some ones distribution
already installed upon your system.
I am hoping to produce something like the
old MS DOS way where you booted up,
partitioned, formatted and install the
DOS shell (Bash for Linux) on 1 CD.
I can see that syslinux is part of this key
and indeed, is used by many of the big Linux
brand names, do use syslinux to boot up a ram
disk (initrd) at the start of the install.
Can you boot up a Linux CD and mount it as
/root with a directory structure containing
tools and the needed header files?
Can any of you give me info on any good
books (Making a Linux Distribution)/ info
files on how to set about this task?
Any good ideas on how to go about it would
also be welcome.
Regards,
James
James at jabcomp.force9.co.uk
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