APC administrator27 June 2006, 4:14 AM
Linux cops flack for being an operating system for supernerds who like nothing better than to spend the weekend recompiling their kernel. The advent of slick, pre-built distros are changing this perception, but are they really true to what Linux is all about, or are they starting to get bloated and flabby, like Windows?
Linux cops a lot of arguably unjustified flack from the mainstream media for being an operating system for supernerds who like nothing better than to spend the weekend recompiling their kernel.
The reality is that slick, pre-built distros now provide a perfectly solid alternative to Windows for many users. But user friendly Linux distros do have their own issues: for one thing, they don't exactly provide a 'low-fat PC'.
Here's what to consider before diving in to "rolling your own" or installing a pre-built distro.
For:
The best thing about rolling your own Linux is the fact that you can very easily tailor your software selection. With a bit of thought, a user can create a full suite of software which can make them instantly productive on any PC.And this isn't limited to applications; if you don't want to include driver modules for hardware that your PC isn't using, then leave them out and put something else there instead. Why do you need PCMCIA modules for a desktop PC anyway?
Not only is this advantageous to the desktop Linux user, but the sysadmins among us have even more to gain. Want to ensure that the software and OS versions on every desktop in your workplace is the same? Done. Want to have an instant restore solution if the office proxy server goes down? Done.
It's also a great way to learn about your operating system (if that's what gets you up in the morning). Linux is very descriptive about everything that happens with it, and the process of building your own distribution is no exception.
Against:
Well, it's a little tough for one thing. If you don't already use Linux, you've probably stopped reading by now. If you haven't, you may as well; without already having a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the OS, the task will be near impossible.
Another problem is that you can end up making life really difficult for yourself as far as using the computer. For example, say you want to make a lo-fat desktop OS, you probably don't want GNOME or KDE included in your packages. Then you go to install the Gimp, and find that you need to have a lot of GNOME libraries anyway, and that K3B needs a lot of Qt. So you end up downloading 50 to 100MB of packages simply because you wanted to free up some space for OpenOffice.org.
And the hardware module tailoring is a mixed blessing for desktop users at best. I don't know about you, but my hardware is liable to change every fortnight, meaning more time spent downloading after the fact.
In the enterprise world, it's more useful because most of the computers will be bought at the same time. Even then, though, it's not perfect. If our office is anything to go by, most of the desktop PCs deployed in the enterprise world have subtle hardware differences which confound any attempt to reinstall even Windows on them.
In our case, using a custom distribution which doesn't have the hardware support of the big desktop players like SuSE or Ubuntu would create a nightmare of tweaking.
In the end, though, ask yourself if it might not be easier to just do a post-install customise of your favourite distro rather than making one from scratch.
Still interested?
If you do want to get started with your own distribution, and the against arguments don't worry you, then these links willhelp you get started:
- How to roll your own OS - an old article, but a very good step by step guide to using the low-level CLI tools that ship with a Linux distro to create a new one.
- Tools to roll your own distribution - a brief overview of the most commonly used tools to build custom Linux distros.
- Morphix home - Morphix is a heavily customisable live CD distribution which can boot into a tool used to build a custom distro in the available space of a connected hard drive.