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Ask HN: Proper way to fork a Linux distro?
Ubuntu makes a "mini" distro that is very stripped down. I'm using it and happy. Now I want to run this on other hardware but they do not provide a version for the architecture I want. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
My question is how do I get to a place where I have the sources/packages of this distro that I can compile for the architecture I want?
There are so many distros in the world now that fork other distros (Kubuntu, LUbuntu, Mate) but it is surprisingly hard to get started doing it yourself. I am reading the LFS/BLFS docs, but this would take months to get started I think.
Edit: typo
- InitEnabler 7y agoI'm doing this as well, (Wanting to make a from scratch version of CoreOS). From what I have researched you can do a couple of things. - Could start with something like buildroot / Yocto project. Both projects have lots of archs. Buildroot would prolly be easy to bootstrap your OS. - Use something like Gentoo, Void, Alpine Linux. These distros have pretty good community support but you might be a little bit hard getting stuff started as you would have to set everything up using their tooling. - Look at Cross Linux From Scratch as it will probably help you will with bootstrapping your OS for your specific Arch.
- jason_slack 7y agoThanks, but don’t I still need a package list, to know what sources I need to grab and start with? How do I get that from a prebuilt distro or don’t I? I see Buildroot and Yocto are pretty interesting and handle a lot for you. Thanks for mentioning them.