Build Tools

"Debian Live initramfs generator

Casper provides an initramfs generator suited for booting a Debian Live systems from read only media. Useful to build live CDs."

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/...

"Aurox Live Generator is a tool for building your own operating system bootable directly from CD or DVD. This is the first OS in the world, which gives you a possibility of preparing customized iso images from www site. Person who's preparing system must only choose applications which should be placed on CD or DVD and their own pack of artwork like wallpaper or splash screen. The OS is based on scripts prepared dynammically, which are downloading choosed software from network repositories.

Building the new system in short:

* user is selecting programs from web site which will be added to his system
* next he downloads specially prepared pack of scripts and runs it. Scripts will prepare iso image which user can burn on CD/DVD
* user burns an iso image and booting the new system from CD/DVD [...]

Project status

Currently project is at testing stage. The quickly test the latest working version of scripts by generating live from WWW (see links below). You can browse the latest source code with Your WWW browser from adress:

http://svn.aurox.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/s...

or download the latest SVN version by typing:

svn co http://svn.aurox.org/svn/aurox/scripts/liv...

You can also browse automaic home generation scripts written by Dariusz Gut from Aurox Core Team by typing:

svn co http://svn.aurox.org/svn/aurox/scripts/gen... "

http://www.aurox.org/en/

larch is a kit for building a live CD based on Archlinux.
Package selection is fully configurable, and a simple hard disk installer is also provided, the result being a completely standard and up-to-date Archlinux system. It should be possible to run the build scripts on most up-to-date Linux systems, so you don't already need an Arch system to build the CD.
Extensive documentation is provided.

http://four.fsphost.com/gradgrind

Backup Host:

"Until I've got something new sorted out you should be able to download the stuff as a tarball (larch_all.tar.gz), including all the docs, from http://www.savefile.com/files/5968615 "

"Gendist is a live CD generator system. It has nice features like multi-distribution CDs, support for grub, isolinux, and gfxboot boot managers, and a modules system for configuring your distribution in live mode. This system is independent from the kernel version (but need unionfs and squashfs support). It only works on Debian Sid or Ubuntu Dapper."

http://freshmeat.net/projects/gendistcrisol/

https://forja.rediris.es/projects/gendist/ (spanish)

"MkDistro has evolved to an excellent tool for building and remastering modules and whole Distros. [...] [It leverages] the Morphix approach of modules and his previous works on developing the HD remastering scripts for the Kurumin, Knoppix, Kanotix and Beatrix Live CD Distros."

http://www.dreamlinux.com.br/english/saiba...

"Ubuntu Customization Kit (UCK) is a set of tools for easy cutomization of Ubuntu Linux distribution (and its derivatives, like Kubuntu).

Currently it allows you to:

* Create bootable LiveCD with predefined languages based on original Ubuntu/Kubuntu live CD using wizard with GUI.

* Build live CD with special features using scripts. It is possible to customize root filesystem (for example install/remove packages), ISO contents (add/remove docs, change names) and initrd (add modules to boot, change boot sequence)."

http://uck.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/uck/

http://lichota.net/~krzysiek/projects/ubun...

"Crucible is a flexible, layered set of tools for pulling down software from the web, building it, running tests on it, and reporting any unusual behaviors back to the parent project.

But since every testing project is unique, we strive to structure Crucible as a set of distinct tools that can be used independently or in other frameworks. Thus, if you're working on your own test harness, we hope you can cherry pick something of use to you from Crucible. :-)

Crucible has been used for doing automated testing of:

* NFSv4 kernel code - client / server multi-machine testing
* Inkscape - build, make check
* Cairo - build, make check
* Crucible - of course [...]

It was created because while there are a lot of automated test harness out there, none were found that could both do kernel booting and allow for orchestrating testing across multiple machines. The Samba build farm was selected as a starting point because the code was simple and relatively clear.

A key design goal of Crucible is to keep its focus as *limited* as possible. "Do one thing, and do it well." Many test harnesses try to do _too_ much, and in the process become too cumbersome and unweildy to be of real use for doing real world testing. I need the ability to easily break things apart and run things in isolation, so I can dig my hands in and get a good grasp on the bug. Also, every test project is unique, so by keeping Crucible's scope limited, it makes it easier to reuse for a wide variety of test harness needs.

Crucible is implemented mainly in Bash. This was done not because I love bash (I actually much prefer Perl), but because bash is reasonably easy to debug, it's widely known, and fairly easily learned. Much of what Crucible does is just file and process manipulation, and bash is pretty good at that. For more complex tasks, or for functionality that bash isn't that good at, I code a tool in a better language and exec that."

http://crucible.sourceforge.net/

"Scratchbox is a cross-compilation toolkit designed to make embedded Linux application development easier. It also provides a full set of tools to integrate and cross-compile an entire Linux distribution."

http://www.scratchbox.org/

"Buildroot is a set of Makefiles and patches that allows to easily generate both a cross-compilation toolchain and a root filesystem for your target. The cross-compilation toolchain uses uClibc (http://www.uclibc.org/), a tiny C standard library. [...]

As said above, Buildroot is basically a set of Makefiles that download, configure and compiles software with the correct options. It also includes some patches for various software, mainly the ones involved in the cross-compilation tool chain (gcc, binutils and uClibc)."

http://buildroot.uclibc.org/

http://buildroot.uclibc.org/buildroot.html

"This section describes how to generate boot images yourself.

If you have installed the Udpcast image generator RPM, the boot image generator is located in /usr/lib/udpcast/makeImage, and needs the following additional packages to be installed:

* mknbi (only needed for generating etherboot images), can be downloaded from Etherboot's site
* syslinux (for PXE, and CD-Rom. For floppy, the relevant files are already included with the image generator itself)

These additional packages are already supplied with most major distributions (SuSE, Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, ...)"

http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/mkimagedoc.html