Create my own linux ISO

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Thursday 08 March 2007 09:35, Brian Hawkins wrote:
> Over the next few months I need to put together my own linux distro
> image.  I guess I need to backup first.  For school I'm creating a way
> to perform differential bittorrent downloads.  I want to use linux
> distribution images as my test data.  The idea is that if I have one
> release of an image and I want to download the next, chances are they
> are not entirely different.  It would be really cool if I could then use
> matching blocks from the previous image to complete the new image and
> therefore shortening my time to download.
>
> With that said I need to build my own distribution image that I can
> update with changes periodically and test against previous images.  I
> also need to change the way the compression is done when putting the
> image together.  The compression makes a big difference when trying to
> find matching blocks in a previous image.
>
> So my requirements are:
> I can build it on my Fedora Core 6 machine.
> The packages update regularly so I can create new versions of the image
> with changes.
> I can modify the compression used when putting the image together.
>
> I have no idea where to start with accomplishing this, as I have never
> put together a distribution before.  I would appreciate anyone with
> experience in this area.

Gentoo has a tool to make bootable images as well.
I'm not sure how you are planning on computing the differences, but as a 
suggestion, xdelta comes to mind as perhaps being useful.