With the increasing success of Linux, the ratio of flavors per user has droped considerably below one. GENDIST is a tool to change this ;-). With GENDIST, you can easily create your own special flavor.

Of course, it is not targeted at the creation of large, multi-purpose flavors. There are enough of these around. It's main aim is to help in the creation of special-purpose mini-flavors.

A mini-flavor typically consists of a kernel and a root-filesystem, both packed together on one or a few floppies. Nowadays, the (bootable) CD-ROM also is a valid media for these flavors.

GENDIST creates a makefile-based build-system for your flavor. It helps you to automate the following three tasks:

• maintain your root-filesystem
• maintain your "cd-filesystem" (in case you create a bootable CD)
• package everything on a media

Another use of GENDIST is to maintain change-root environments.

GENDIST creates a hierarchy of makefiles with a number of standard targets. You only have to plugin your kernel and your "packages" (i.e. the software you want to put on the root-filesystem). Since GENDIST uses makefiles, it is no problem to integrate software created from source.

GENDIST is similar to BYLD, but it is makefile-based and modular, therefore it is much easier to create your flavor from source. Also, it supports more media-types and is more flexible.

The following media are currently supported:

• classical combined root-boot floppies
• classical two-floppy solution (separate boot-floppy and root-floppy)
• lilo-based floppies
• syslinux boot-floppy (1.44 MB and 2.88 MB)
• El-Torito bootable CD-ROMs
• isolinux CD-ROMs (these allow very large initial ramdisks)
• Bochs HD-images
• plain (data, yellow-book) CD-ROMs (to hold additional stuff)
• plain diskettes (to hold additional stuff)
• plain disk with a single (possibly compressed) tar-archive of a directory-tree.