Raspberry Pi Forums

Hello,
is it possible to build your own Linux on the RPi?

Being pedantic, I'm not sure whether you want to build a Linux Distribution or the Linux Kernel.

Assuming you mean a Linux Distribution:
Yes - you can, providing you have enough computing power - I don't think that a Raspberry Pi on it's own is quite enough to create a build in a reasonable time. As a starting point to see how it can be done, take a look at 'spindle' - the scripts used to create the Foundation Raspbian Wheezy Distribution:
https://github.com/asb/spindle

Or my fork of Spindle that I used to create my own Raspbian Jessie Distribution:
https://github.com/bcroston/spindle

Bear in mind that the .deb packages for armhf v6 have already been built/compiled, saving a massive amount of work.

Of course there are other ways of doing it - I don't know much about how the Arch or the Fedora Remix distributions are created. I'm sure you could even create your own by compiling everything from scratch - this would take you a long time though!
Edit: the PiLFS link above by @fruitoftheloom does this.

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Assuming you mean the Linux Kernel:
I've never done this for Raspbian myself. Google is probably your friend here - there are plenty of other people that have done it.

Bah!

I was building Linux From Scratch back in 1998, or so, on a 120MHz 486 machine.

I'm very sure it's doable on a Pi.

You can always take a nap whilst the compilations are going on

Heater wrote:Bah!

I was building Linux From Scratch back in 1998, or so, on a 120MHz 486 machine.

I'm very sure it's doable on a Pi.

You can always take a nap whilst the compilations are going on

+1

When I did Linux from Scratch on an old machine it was often a case of set it going today, come back to the next step tomorrow. Some of those tomorrows were a long time after the task was set running.

I often leave things compiling over night, because watching paint dry is less boring than watching a long compile run.

thank you everyone. great news.
ian t