Linux and Free Software :: Best Remastering distro

I think that DSL is the best distro to remaster because you start with only 50MB which is about as close as you can get to a blank slate without starting from scratch. What does everyone else think?

oops I just noticed that I posted this in the help forum. thats what I get for working on 3 hours of sleep.

I can move it for ya~

It is hard to beat DSL.

A good reference is: Knoppix Hacks by Kyle Rankin, O'Reilly, 2004.

Jeff

Dsl/Knoppix is great for remastering. It's fairly easy to use in the first place, with good hardware detection, and after wading through the forums it's a fairly straightforward procedure to remaster. My only complaint in the remastering process is trying to compile programs that I want to include in my remaster. To keep things small a lot of things had to be stripped away, and sometimes it seems like there is always a missing library or include file for whatever you want to add.

Has anyone else looked at Linux From Scratch? The name makes it sound like a piece of crap, but it's actually pretty nice. The liveCD is around 380 Megs, and it has a lot of developement tools and libraries built from the GNU sources. It does require more knowledge to use than dsl does, so that is a big disadvantage to people without any linux experience. Things like starting your session in a terminal screen and needing to set up X instead of having X start up right away automatically configured. Once it's set up, though, compiling programs is incredibly easy.

As an example, Xorg detected an nvidia driver which was great, but I had to do a little more leg work (modifying xorg.conf and .xinitrc) to get X to run. Firefox is included, so I was able to download fluxbox (twm was the window manager included on the liveCD). Fluxbox compiled without problems, without needing to apt-get half a dozen development packages (everything needed was on the liveCD except for the fluxbox tarball). You have to know how to modify .xinitrc in order to use fluxbox, however.

So I liked it better in that things compiled much cleaner and easier because of the included tools and development libraries, the kernel is 2.6 with sources included, and its use of unionfs got rid of the read only filesystem errors. I liked it less because the remastering aspects are much more involved and require a lot more disk space.

So: parts were better and parts were worse. DSL wins hands down for newer user remastering.

So anyone have any good resources or HOWTO's on how to remaster DVD to DIVX?

I am getting one of these units very soon
I-O DATA's brand-new LinkPlayer in which I can store all my childrens movies on harddrive (I have like 60 and only 2 dont have massive skipping scratches all over them!! AAARRRGH!)

I want to be able to convert the DVD (once I get them freeking repaired (at like $2 a pop!) and put them in a data repository, this way I can keep my movies for my kids in a safe place and wont have to keep buying (The Incredibles 4 times!) them over and over again!

Brian
AwPhuch

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