Create your personal and up-to-date distribution

Create your personal and up-to-date distribution

Most popular linux distributions (such as Fedora or Ubuntu) release a new version periodically, usually each 6 months. This means that until the next release you will not install a very new kernel or very new drivers for you very new hardware. This can be critical in cases where, for example, your network card or your video card is not recognized at all. How to update before installing? The solution is to remaster your own distribution with the updated packages. This can be easily done with tools such as 'revisor' for Fedora. There exist many other tools for other distributions and others are distribution indipendent but far more complicated. Tools like revisor are very useful not only because you will be able to use immediately your very new laptop instead of waiting next release but also because you can build your personal distribution with all the packages you prefer and then install it in a single click instead of selecting and unselecting from the never ending list of software.

Usage case: you buy a very new laptop with very cool hardware which is not supported by the drivers in your preferred distribution latest release and want to migrate you old Fedora OS to the new.

Install revisor:

# yum install revisor

You can either run the GUI, very intuitive, or create the image file in a single click:

# revisor --cli --model f12-i386 --kickstart /etc/revisor/conf.d/fedora-12-gold.cfg --install-cd --install-dvd --install-dir /hardisk/with/lot/of/space

In order to do this, you need the proper configuration file, either /etc/revisor/conf.d/conf/fedora-12-gold.cfg and /etc/revisor/revisor.conf. You can get them from here.

A lot more informations in the project page.