The GENDIST Toolkit

What it is

With the increasing success of Linux, the ratio of distributions per user has droped considerably below one. GENDIST is a tool to change this ;-) With GENDIST, you can easily create your own special distribution.

Of course, it is not targeted at the creation of large, multi-purpose distributions. There are enough of these around. It's main aim is to help in the creation of special-purpose mini-distributions.

A mini-distribution typically consists of a kernel and a root-filesystem, both packed together on one or a few floppies. Nowadays, the (bootable) CD-ROM also is a valid media for these distributions.

GENDIST creates a makefile-based build-system for your distribution. It helps you to automate the following three tasks:

• maintain your root-filesystem
• maintain your "cd-filesystem" (in case you create a bootable CD)
• package everything on a media

GENDIST creates a hierarchy of makefiles with a number of standard targets. You only have to plugin your kernel and your "packages" (i.e. the software you want to put on the root-filesystem). Since GENDIST uses makefiles, it is no problem to integrate software created from source.

GENDIST is similar to BYLD, but it is makefile-based and modular, therefore it is much easier to create your distribution from source. Also, it supports more media-types and is more flexible.

The following media are currently supported:

• classical combined root-boot floppies
• classical two-floppy solution (separate boot-floppy and root-floppy)
• lilo-based floppies
• syslinux boot-floppy (1.44 MB and 2.88 MB)
• El-Torito bootable CD-ROMs
• isolinux CD-ROMs (these allow very large initial ramdisks)
• Bochs HD-images (see http://bochs.sourceforge.net)
• plain (data, yellow-book) CD-ROMs (to hold additional stuff)
• plain diskettes (to hold additional stuff)
• plain disk with a single (possibly compressed) tar-archive of a directory-tree.

Download

The current stable version is gendist-1.6.0.tar.bz2 (about 104 KB). You either need the bunzip2-utility to unpack the archive, or a current version of GNU tar. In the latter case, you can use a command like

tar -xvjf gendist-1.6.0.tar.bz2

Be sure to download the archive in binary mode. The md5 checksum is:

cfe8aa5a55d7777f1634d587c7c5aa55  gendist-1.6.0.tar.bz2
    

News

Important recent changes:

• Version 1.6.0: Added media-type "bochs". Make 3.80 broke GENDIST. Fixed it.
• Version 1.4.10: Added example "TwoStageLinux". This is a workaround for BIOSes not supporting isolinux. Upgraded to isolinux 2.0. Fixed a problem with recent versions of bash.
• Version 1.4.8: Bugfix in blocks-per-group calculation (can't be larger than 8192)
• Version 1.4.7: Fixed calculation of inodes/blocks/blocks-per-group for initrds (workaround for mke2fs bug/feature)
• Version 1.4.6: Added INSTALL as template file
• Version 1.4.5: Minor changes/bugfixes
• Version 1.4.4: Improved default unpacking of source-archives. Example package "kernel" is now working.
• Version 1.4.3: A critical bugfix in "make clean". Improved flexibility when creating packages from source. Additional minor feature enhancements.
• Version 1.4.0: Added rules to create packages from source (including automatic download). Changed implementation of one-time build-environment targets (created now using packages).

For a complete list of changes, see the files NEWS and ChangeLog in the distribution.