Creating a special-purpose Gentoo-based distribution

skaboobie · n00b Joined: 27 Apr 2005 Posts: 1

At the University at Buffalo where I work, I am mainly responsible for creating and maintaining our own customized desktop distribution of Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The general idea is that a novice user just supplies disk partitioning information, and installer just installs everything that we think they need for a general-purpose academic desktop system. The user is not prompted for anything else, not even packages. For more information regarding what I'm talking about, see:

http://www.cit.buffalo.edu/linux/

http://wings.buffalo.edu/computing/ublinux/

Anyhow, I'd like to do something similar for musicians who want to record music. There are some distributions out there already, such as Planet CCRMA, Fervent StudioToGo, and AGNULA. However, these are all binary distributions. Binary distributions are fine, but when you are doing real-time multitrack recording, any performance gains are extremely helpful.

What I would like to do is be able to create a CD or DVD disk image of a Gentoo-based distribution such that the end user is only required to supply the disk partitioning scheme and the architecture of the machine they are installing on. (It would be even better if the installer could just detect the CPU, if that's possible.) Then the installer would build from source the entire system and pre-selected packages nomarch for the architecture they're on. All the source would be included on the CD or DVD. The end result would be an easy-to-install Linux recording system that is optimized for the architecture of the musician's machine.

I'm assuming that Gentoo would be perfect for this. I'm guessing it would be a stage 1 install, but with some scripting and preselected packages. Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to get started with this?

JustinHoMi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Apr 2005 Posts: 97

I'm not so sure gentoo would be "perfect". Most people don't want to spend a full day as the operating system installs. You might be better off just offering several different precompiled versions.