June 1, 2009

Custom Fedora Remix (Desktop DVD)

 
In our local LUG we have been brewing a custom distro based upon Fedora and Omega linux distributions. We also added a lot of applications from many categories; like gps, astronomy, office and multimedia software.
 
What makes it apart from distributions that it is based upon are these points:

  • Much more pre-installed software

  • Latest updated packages

  • Bonus (proprietary) software (Skype, Flash...)

  • Support for broadcom wireless chipset (via firmware)

  • Multiple desktop environments: Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, LXDE...

    •  
    Why did we make this distribution? Because there are just too many things missing by default in current Fedora. Due to laws in US and because the software in question isn't licenced under open source licence Fedora can't provide things like skype and flash that most of users are just too depended upon and can't work without them.
     
    Any comments and suggestions are welcome, tell us what we are doing wrong and how to make this distro better.
     

    Fedora makes possible for anybody to use it's packages for remixing, respinning and making custom versions of Fedora, but those distributions need to have different name. If you have any suggestion how this distro should be called drop a line in the comments.
     
    Because we currently don't have means to make iso images available we can only give you instructions on how to make this remix yourself.
     
    You need to have at least 10GB of free space on your /home partition, or some other partition you use for storing temporary files and for this iso image. Finished ISO image is around 1.4 GB.
     
    First you need to download our custom kickstart files: base, desktop, extra.
     
    Then you need to issue these commands:

      su - yum install livecd-tools spin-kickstarts setenforce 0 mkdir /home/temp/ mkdir /home/yum-cache/ cd ⁄home livecd-creator -t /home/temp/ --cache=/home/yum-cache/ -f F10-Extra-Edition -c linux-osijek-10-extra.ks load_policy setenforce 1  
      Eplanation of used commands; yum - installs needed tools for making iso image setenforce 0 - disables SELinux because it fails with SELinux enabled mkdir - creates directories needed livecd-creator - main command that makes the remixed iso image load_policy and setenforce 1 - re-enables SELinux