[Techtalk] customized installation

[Carla Schroder]

Anyone have thoughts on which Linux lends itself the best to xTreme 
customization? I'm starting a howto series on building a Linux appliance. 
This is targeted at home/small business users, so the hardware can be any old 
PC, and it will do routing, firewalling, HTTP and DNS caching, and maybe cool 
stuff like a WAP, DHCP server, or what-have-you.

All that stuff is pretty straightforward. I thought to add an extra touch of 
coolness, and to also make my life a little easier, I would start with an 
extremely customized Linux installation. Just the essentials with no fluff. 
Sooo...I hereby solicit opinions. Do you think using Fedora or Debian would 
work? I haven't tried slimming either of these down to the bones in ages, I'm 
not sure how far you can go. If I use one of these, I still want to have Yum 
or apt. 

I was thinking it would be simple to cobble up a Kickstart file and use that. 
The idea of writing out a long list of packages and saying "do a custom 
install and select these" seems like the hard way cubed, and Kickstart would 
take care of that

But then I do like Debian, but as far as I know there is nothing like 
Kickstart for Debian. Remember, this has to work for a single user on a 
single machine- they're not going to have their own mirror or anything like 
that.

Then there are specialized tiny Linuxes like Puppy. But this series is also 
intended as general Linux introduction, so whatever the reader learns can be 
easily transferable.

soooo.... ?

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Carla Schroder
 check out my "Linux Cookbook", the ultimate Linux user's
 and sysadmin's guide! http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxckbk/
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