Making Simple Linux Distro from Scratch 

This ~12 minute video explained it better than the entire "Linux From Scratch" book.

My guy really using Ubuntu on Windows Terminal with DWM to build a distro from scratch

I have run Linux since kernel 0.99 (Slackware on floppies) and never really knew/thought about the individual bits and pieces that make up a Linux system. This is super educational. I would love to see an expanded version of this that allows for a basic Linux distro (that includes everything that you mention it would need for production) but without any of the bloat that normally comes with distros. A tiny server Linux if you will. Also, just in general, thank you for making these videos - they're awesome! I appreciate the time and effort you put into them.

Wow, so this is the way to a truly unbloated distro bliss! Good stuff!

I think this is the best educated Linux tutorial I've ever seen

Even though I have no interest in doing something like this myself, I found the whole process rather interesting. 🙂

I have been studying how to do this for thirty years and this is the most coherent explanation/demonstration of how to make a bootable system that I have seen. This is a magnificent work. Thank you.

Thank you this video! I have been using Linux for years, but I am interviewing with a company that builds their own kernel for their product and I wanted to know something about the process. This helped me so much!

my dream of creating my very own linux distro one day, is a step closer. thanks! i tried LFS a long time ago, but gave up half way through did something wrong didn't know what. but yeah a full distro from scratch how cool is that. for educational purposes too.

Really cool to see this, thank you for the simple and easy to follow tutorial. I look forward to diving deeper into how this works.

This video is gold, thanks man. Ever thought about making a video on your very custom distro using the knowledge you showed us in this video?

You did this in 12 minutes?! That's crazy! 🤯

This is the absolute best tutorial on this topic. Please do a tutorial on compiling more packages for the custom operating system. Packages like GCC, sudo, nano and whatnot. And please also do videos on setting up ttys that work hand in hand with key configurations, I've set up my ttys but they don't work with key configurations. A lot of demands here but please also do a video on setting up the root user, sudo (root access) users and normal users, as well as, how to compile and set up wayland, xorg, sddm and possibly even KDE Plasma.

That's so cool :O I did LFS like three times and i always wondered how could i simplify the process to the maximum

Its hilarious how BusyBox is basically a legitimate add-on to docker in that both are containers but BusyBox works as a "from scratch" image for Docker, more so than the docker official scratch image itself

Very nice video! I would enjoy more like these!

May God bless you bro😂 I needed this tutorial. I tried this at first but since i knew nothing about where to place the kernel, or about how to create and use a bootloader, the best i could do was only to make a chroot folder (and i became really good at it lol i even forged my own "terminal" and got it to work in chroot) but now im gonna be practicing this new knowledge everytime i get a chance. Thanks a Lot. For now all i can do is add you a new sub. 🎉

Great tutorial Nir! I have a few followup questions. 1) You used the default kernel config file that came with the repo, instead of replacing it with your Ubuntu machine's config file. And in the default config file, the only change you made was enabling 64 bit. Would that cause any issues if you were to use this kernel in production, since it wasn't "handcrafted" for your machine? 2) Why don't you have to run 'make modules' after you make the kernel? Does the default config file just set all modules to be compiled into the kernel? 3) If you set some modules in the config file to be compiled external from the kernel, where would we copy those .ko module binaries so the kernel could use them? Would they need to be copied into the initramfs cpio archive? Or would they need to be placed on a real disk in a root filesystem the kernel would switch to after it goes through initramfs? 4) Since you copied BusyBox directly into the initramfs archive, the kernel didn't need to mount any real root file system on a real disk. However, suppose we did want to use a real root fs on a real disk, and install BusyBox there instead. How would we need to change the init program and initramfs directory structure and content to make the kernel mount the real disk and change the root directory to the one on the disk?

this make me recall the time we were trying with LFS distro - just doing it without understand anything :)

Funnily enough this is also exactly how Linus Torvalds created the first version of Linux back in the days. He just fired up docker and booted some Ubuntu image

Oh wow, my genius brain clicked on this video thinking you were about to build a basic operating system written in Scratch. And now I want to see someone actually try to do that.

Very cool and well communicated. Thanks!

Instead of dd if=/dev/zero of=boot bs=1M count=50 you can also use truncate -s 50M boot truncate changes the size of a file. If the file does not yet exist, truncate creates it. If the size is shorter than it used to be, the file is in fact just "truncated", hence the name. Yet if the size is bigger, zeros are added at the end until the file reaches the desired new size. Not only is the command shorter, it also has another advantage: truncate creates a sparse file on systems that support that. That may not matter in this example but it would matter if the file was 100 GB in size. In a sparse file, only blocks of that file that contain actual data also use real disk space. All blocks that are still zero filled are virtual, they don't use any disk space and they are also not actually created when you created the file, so file creation is also ultra fast, as all that really happens is that a directory entry is created for that file. Yet when the file is accessed, it will always behave to any file operation as if the file really was 100 GB in size and all filled with zeros. If you jump to the middle of the file and write some data there, only blocks covered by that data will materialize and actually consume disk space, the rest of the file stays virtual.

Thanks, Nir. It was my dream to build my own distro. I printed my name on the distro. Thanks again!

Hello. If I understood correclty the ramfs is indeed for syslinux. The kernel will mount the cpio archive pointed out by syslinux to the kernel through the command linux. I remember It is also possible to embbed the cpio inside the bzImage itself (option in menuconfig).

Amazing and very useful for studying Linux!

super clear and interesting! Subscribed.

cool! combined with something like sinit and sbase and voila - extremely small desktop linux :)

Looks like someone else also watched Rob Landley's video on a minimalist Linux. Although this is even tighter than his, even if it doesn't exit properly.

BRAVO, BRAVO! That was great!

Hello NIr, thank you very much for all your "in-depth" and short, very well explained videos! Great! Do you like to do a "real" minimalistic linux system with a graphical interface with that approach? What do you think? Or is it too much to think of and better take arch linux and do a minimalistic linux with dwm, vim and so on from there? Thanks, shalom and best regards Daniel

I have few things to request if you don't mind creating a video. 1. Can you create a distro using a base debian or ubuntu image? 2. Illustration of how to use systemd as a init system. 3. And use Grub2 as the bootloader.

Following this tutorial was easier than installing arch Linux

good and precise to the point

Happy to see this!!😃

simply amazing...

Subscribed right away

such amazing video. Can U publish similar but to create minimal system to boot on old raspberry 1/2 ? Regards!

Nice video! I wanted also to implement the switching from the initramfs to a normal ext4 partition. It took me the last 6 hours because I had to use a different bootloader (systemd boot on aarch64) and because the fucking UEFI implementation for QEMU (asahi linux) did not had a SATA driver built in, I was not able to boot from any SATA disk, which means I have to use a virtio disk to boot and the Linux kernel did not want to detect a virtio disk but an SATA disk which means, I am currently having two disks with the same img file just to be able to boot from it and mount it in Linux. Arm is nice but the next time I am doing it on my Desktop with x86 xD

This is super cool!!

I had to do somth9ing very similar before to be able to boot systemd system when using a btrfs file system. I however did not use busybox as I did not need a full enviroment to work in. The system basically just needed to load up enough system to be able to read the file system and start systemd, then pivot root into the real FS. Funny enough what you did is pretty much what dracut and other programs are actually doing when they create the initramfs image.

technically with EFI stub compiled into the kernel, you can directly boot it from uefi, no bootloader needed.

I wanted to customize the kernel for development boards (embedded systems) and this video being what i realy expects by building the ninux kernel from scratch making this video as a series that show the other options for production standards

Yes u made my day. 🎉😊

Great video. Thank You .... Only I would change one thing :) ...as a total beginner, it would be nice to see the result / what to expect on the beginning of the video, and then the explanation how to do it. For me the experience was as : command after command, and I had no idea where we are going :) ...on the end it was totally worth it :) Thank You

Thanks for guide. I wonder , how extendable this system in your opinion ? I have been through Lfs book and I can't get rid of intrusive thoughts to build a (mostly) gnuless system from a linux installation you shown. I completely understand that it doesn't make any sense, pure enthusiasm and curiosity.

hmm... simple panic fix would be while [ 1 ]; do /bin/sh; done? xD At any rate fun stuff, I used to do LFS for fun when I was a teen, makes me miss those days.

I love your video, can you make one on how to make http request for windows os?

Slackware installer is my ideal distro 😂

windows -> wsl -> ubuntu -> dwm -> distro from scratch

Why are you using Windows though?

what do you recommend i look into/do if i want to go further in making it useable?

Can you make a follow up video like configuring syslinux to auto boot the os and adding persistence or burning it to a iso/img

Hello! I might be doing something wrong, but I tried to boot this on an older laptop without EFI support. Seemingly everything seems to be fine (booting it with GRUB, actually), but after I get a few messages from the kernel printed to the screen, everything goes black, my pendrive (the boot device) blinks a few times and I get stuck there. What could possibly be the issue?

Excellent

How did this come to be? I mean... I already knew what a bootloader, kernel, busybox and initramfs did, but I never knew (or even got close to thinking for that matter) that you could put them together just like this. Did you first come up with the idea to do the bare minimum to get a shell working as init process, then read how the initramfs worked in detail just to get the system running and finally looked for a minimalist bootloader? Just how did this pop in your mind?

I know a lot of people have asked the same question, but how would I write this to a USB drive to boot it on a real machine? I've tried to use tools like dd or genisoimage, but even after a few hours, I still can't get it to work. Usually, it just says there's no bootable device, other times, it says the device doesn't support UEFI booting.

I am gonna try once i get some time to spare. Really interesting. Can we make a distro with AI integration ?

How to create an iso from the img, maybe with grub to automatically load kernel +initramfs

I can’t remember the name but in the pre Linux kernel 1.00 days there used to be a single boot floppy that would ask a bunch of questions, download and compile from sources. In those days I’d boot it and answer everything in the morning then let it down load, configure, compile, and install till the next morning. Lol. Ah the good ole days

Have you done one about buildroot? To make custom os for customs apps light weight

Could you theoretically install a desktop envirement and make an iso out of it. thx, btw. good video

6:15 Ahh, it confuses me, much like the chicken and egg situation 😅

thank you

Also, do you think you could please make a tutorial video on how to compile the custom distro into an ISO file?

why was this recommended to me at 12:​53 AM and why am I watching this

what a mad lad

good. thx

Hi i keep getting an error when mounting boot as m (mount: m: failed to setup loop device for /boot-files/boot.)

So busy box is a user space? What are alternatives, primarily interested into using apt, if applicable a basic GUI (I have my mind of what Icon set I want to use). Those options are and or conditions. Just want to know some user space alternatives and its names.

It would be nice to start with Docker installation. Not everybody knows what it is.

Hey you installed busybox differently but *Build Minimal Linux in 1 Hour* guy did make a static binary and linked it inside /bin/busybox Can I ask what is the difference which is better approach?

Instead of running the shell with the shell, you could just use a symlink I think?

So I've tried doing this on my M1 mac and spent an hour swearing and cussing ;-) So the problem is the arm architecture (even the menuconfig is different). It creates a slightly differnt image (Image.gz) etc. And the worst problem is the bootloader. Syslinux doesn't exist there (but there is some syslinux-common package). If you could suggest some workarounds, it'd be great. Tried playing with u-boot, but since I have very little experience with bootloaders, I didn't make much progress. In the end I emulated the right architecture (docker run --platform linux/amd64) and I'm doing it from scratch again. However it's visibly slower. On original architecture, the kernel compiled in 8 minutes. Now I'm way past it and it's still compiling

The step I'm not following fully is at 9:25 when you mount boot into m. What happens when you mount a file to a directory then copy those files into that mounted directory?

splendid

Hey I have a project as a part of my OS Course called "Linux Kernel Development". Can i make this as my project. Or kernel development is far more beyond what you did in the video?

Can you explain how you got DWM on what I assume to be windows?

Oh, yes, my dream is now one step closer to being realized. Soon enough you all shall tremble before the power of my own linux distro, liNUTS.

Nice.

Great job, thanks!

Hey man nice job on the tutorial! Only thing im stuck on is mounting the boot file. It says that it keeps on saying that vfat is unknown. Im not sure what I did wrong.

Make a video showing how to install gcc on that distro

How long did it take to compile?? mine is going for about 30mins

So this Linux system wasn't mounted to the root filesystem and instead stuck in the initramfs? I notice the root filesystem is not created. Wow looks interesting, didn't know that it would work.

hey i wanna make my own ubuntu based distro with some custom tools amd softwars which i can then install on real computer too, with custom boot logo and all, can you guide in some main points like what to learn and from where to start, waiting for reply please must guide me

Hello, i like this video, Is it possible to install an interface like GNOME or Xfce? If so, can you show how to do it? I would also like to know how to take this to production.

If I want to use the default init from the busybox instead of the simple bash you provide, what should I prepare?

Is this minimalistic environment sufficient to bootstrap Linux From Scratch?

I'm getting an error with mount: `mount: m: failed to setup loop device for /boot-files/boot.` EDIT - FIXED: If you get the same error, just create a loop device and try mounting the file. If mount doesn't work, use losetup (search “how to mount file using losetup”). If losetup doesn't work *after* you've tried mount, delete the loop device by rebooting and try again, but just try losetup and not mount. How to create a loop device: `$ sudo mknod -m 660 /dev/loop0 b 7 0`

What version of ubuntu are you using to make this build?

I have a custom built distro without boot configuration. So based on this tutorial, i did convert my whole root directory into init.cpio (init script also added). And did the same boot configuration(based on distro size, i have created the boot file with count=4000 (4GB)). But when i want to run the kernel via qemu, "init.cpio...failed, no such file or directory" error occures. Does anyone have a idea? The cpio file exist i had double check.

Next video: Making a lunar module from scratch

sweet

I came to check comments section to make sure this isn't a joke (im not joking)

how would i go about implementing apt or opkg?

how to add a desktop environment into it? and store it to a usb?

You never truly singlehandedly master the x86, unless you write something like a TempleOS

Alternatives to Syslinux are Grub and...? Alternatives to BusyBox are ToyBox and...? ❤ Thank you!

Since you've built the distro using Ubuntu, doesn't that mean the built distro is Ubuntu-based? Cause I know that some commands implement some of the components used in the currently running distro, but I wonder if your build has any components from your Ubuntu container.