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Building a Linux distro from scratch has been one of the most tasking projects I've attempted. There are two phases: the frustration phase, and the tedious phas

Building a Linux distro from scratch has been one of the most tasking projects I've attempted. There are two phases: the frustration phase, and the tedious phase. Bootstrapping it is an incredibly frustrating process - I restarted from scratch 5 times before any attempt ever got to the tedious phase. The tedious phase never ends. You have to make hundreds of packages to get to a usable desktop system. I've made 407 packages and I still don't have a desktop to show for it (I'm hoping to get sway working tomorrow, I think I have about 30 packages left). Still, I've finally gotten to a somewhat practical self-hosting system. My laptop runs it on the metal and all of the infrastructure (website, bugzilla, git hosting, mirrors) is on a server running my distro too. It's taken almost a year of frustration, but it's very rewarding.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago
Good for you for sticking with it. I've started in that direction a few times, but it really is amazing just how necessary all those hacky distro-maintained build scripts and patches are. It's tempting to think that they're just tweaking things to fit their conventions and handling edge cases, but they're often just getting it to not explode by default.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  I've made several compromises so far. I've been making a note of them with the expectation (or hope) that I'll get to them, or a bright eyed new contributor might (I have some of those :D).
  - sq_ 10y ago
    Do you have a Github repo or something similar for the distro? I'd love to see it if you do.
    - smcl 10y ago
      Or even a blog post or something talking about it. I understand that sharing your experiences with the rest of the world might not be top priority while you're hammering away at sorting out these packages so I don't expect you to stop what you're doing purely to satisfy us on HN! But if you've already got something I'd love to see it :-)
      - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
        Blog post: https://drewdevault.com/2017/05/05/Building-a-real-Linux-distro.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/05/05/Building-a-real-Linux-dis... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274352
        smcl 10y ago
        Amazing - I had no idea you were the person behind KnightOS, I've previously read a few of your posts and thoroughly enjoyed them (the one about the US election particularly hit home). Thanks so much
    - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
      https://agunix.org https://agunix.org
albertzeyer 10y ago
I'm just curious: In what way is it rewarding? Just for educational purpose? Or anything else? Or is it just a hobby? I mean, you are probably investing a lot of time into this. This time you could spend on other things instead. I see the educational purpose. Although you probably get similar experience/understanding/education if you use something like Gentoo and you would have to invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of.
- yebyen 10y ago
  > invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of I'm certain (because I learned with Slackware before there was Gentoo) that those nasty corner cases are actually where the rewarding part is. The progression of distros for me was, ZipSlack (fit on a 100MB Zip Disk), Red Hat, Mandrake, then back to Slackware once I actually had a real decent internet connection, and I can say for sure that dealing with those naturally occurring corner cases was a lot more fun than dealing with those "it's packaged, but for a different version of RedHat, so it won't work on your Mandrake install" Eventually I switched to Debian and was able to just stop caring about that stuff for the most part until something was too fresh to find a package. (I'd run Unstable, and everything was either packaged already or the vast majority of the dependencies were already packaged.) I don't know if there was any tangible reward from learning to build Enlightenment, and a full stack of graphical libraries underneath, but at least I did get Enlightenment from it. (!!)
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  It's rewarding because I finally have a Linux distro that's designed the way I want. I started making this because I wasn't satisfied with anyone else's offerings.
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    What about Arch Linux?
  - albertzeyer 10y ago
    Can you say what is different in your distro than in any other distro? And you think that no other distro could have been extended/fixed to get what you want? Do you consider that this is useful for anyone else? In that case, you really should publish your work and write about it.

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

Good for you for sticking with it. I've started in that direction a few times, but it really is amazing just how necessary all those hacky distro-maintained build scripts and patches are. It's tempting to think that they're just tweaking things to fit their conventions and handling edge cases, but they're often just getting it to not explode by default.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
I've made several compromises so far. I've been making a note of them with the expectation (or hope) that I'll get to them, or a bright eyed new contributor might (I have some of those :D).
- sq_ 10y ago
  Do you have a Github repo or something similar for the distro? I'd love to see it if you do.
  - smcl 10y ago
    Or even a blog post or something talking about it. I understand that sharing your experiences with the rest of the world might not be top priority while you're hammering away at sorting out these packages so I don't expect you to stop what you're doing purely to satisfy us on HN! But if you've already got something I'd love to see it :-)
    - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
      Blog post: https://drewdevault.com/2017/05/05/Building-a-real-Linux-distro.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/05/05/Building-a-real-Linux-dis... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274352
      - smcl 10y ago
        Amazing - I had no idea you were the person behind KnightOS, I've previously read a few of your posts and thoroughly enjoyed them (the one about the US election particularly hit home). Thanks so much
  - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
    https://agunix.org https://agunix.org

albertzeyer 10y ago

I'm just curious: In what way is it rewarding? Just for educational purpose? Or anything else? Or is it just a hobby? I mean, you are probably investing a lot of time into this. This time you could spend on other things instead. I see the educational purpose. Although you probably get similar experience/understanding/education if you use something like Gentoo and you would have to invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of.

yebyen 10y ago
> invest much less time because all the nasty corner cases are already taken care of I'm certain (because I learned with Slackware before there was Gentoo) that those nasty corner cases are actually where the rewarding part is. The progression of distros for me was, ZipSlack (fit on a 100MB Zip Disk), Red Hat, Mandrake, then back to Slackware once I actually had a real decent internet connection, and I can say for sure that dealing with those naturally occurring corner cases was a lot more fun than dealing with those "it's packaged, but for a different version of RedHat, so it won't work on your Mandrake install" Eventually I switched to Debian and was able to just stop caring about that stuff for the most part until something was too fresh to find a package. (I'd run Unstable, and everything was either packaged already or the vast majority of the dependencies were already packaged.) I don't know if there was any tangible reward from learning to build Enlightenment, and a full stack of graphical libraries underneath, but at least I did get Enlightenment from it. (!!)
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
It's rewarding because I finally have a Linux distro that's designed the way I want. I started making this because I wasn't satisfied with anyone else's offerings.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  What about Arch Linux?
- albertzeyer 10y ago
  Can you say what is different in your distro than in any other distro? And you think that no other distro could have been extended/fixed to get what you want? Do you consider that this is useful for anyone else? In that case, you really should publish your work and write about it.