Building a Linux distribution
Monday, November 12th, 2007“Think of all the activities that must be carried out for any work of art to appear as it finally does. For a symphony orchestra to give a concert, for instance, instruments must have been invented, manufactured, and maintained, a notation must have been devised and music composed using that notation, people must have learned to play the notated notes on the instruments, times and places for rehearsal must have been provided, ads for the concert must have been placed, publicity must have been arranged and tickets sold, and an audience capable of listening to an in some way understanding and responding to the performance must have been recruited.”Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (1982), p. 2.
One of the main concern of sociology of science and technology is to show that each product (with knowledge being the product of science) is the result of social cooperation and collaboration at each step of the production process. Understanding the production process in detail is thus crucial in order to retrace which (social) decisions have been taken at which point and how they have influenced the current state of the product. Applying Howard S. Becker’s description about the symphony orchestra concert to Redflag or Asianux will require a more thorough understanding of the activities which need to be carried out to build a Linux distribution with support for Asian languages.
Redflag and Asianux are both Linux distributions, that is a composition of software built from the Linux kernel and a set of additional packages. These out-of-the-box applications allow users to easily setup and install Linux without going through the pain of compiling, installing and configuring all components from source, including the necessary drivers for a particular hardware. Information about how to build your own Linux distribution can be found here:
- Linux from Scratch, a set of step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
- How to build your own Linux distribution, a IBM article on the topic: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-lfs/index.html
- ROCK Linux, a Linux Distribution Build Kit: http://www.rocklinux.org