[lug] Re: Developing New Linux System

I'm not a kernel programmer, in fact I consider myself as a newbie in
such things :(

However I think this would work:

First: it's hardly probable that you will have to do any essential
programming, because nowadays everything is unicode, even filesystems.
Which is not unicode, it's supported *by* unicode.
So be your goal that your system must support this encoding.

- install a system and configure it to support unicode
() config your kernel with unicode support
() in /etc change your config files and startup scripts so you
get a system that speaks English but understands your language (kbd
layouts, fonts, etc).
- acquire the sources of everything you think you will need (kernel,
utils, shells, compilers, window manager, X)
- compile a text editor that supports unicode (vim 4ever :)
- make sure your c and cpp compilers support unicode too (bootstrapping)

Teach the sources your language:
- change string constants in sources (your editor and your compiler
now supports unicode, so there should be no problem)

-Now the only thing that would be a bit more difficult, is to compile
the native font into the kernel (since startup scripts obviously run
after kernel has been started).

- compile
- learn how to put all this in one distro
- burn a cd and share the sources on the web

Altogether this means that you have to build up from scratch, from the
very beginning (you will need to bootstrap your toolchain).
Use Gentoo. Why? Easy to use (bootstrapping is painless, acquiring
sources is easy) and it's almost like LFS.

Download a live image from http://www.gentoo.org/
Read the docs; use Stage1

I'm quite sure about what I've said (I would definitely start this
way), but listen to the wisemen (you group members :) who can say more
useful things than me.

I hope you'll get through with this!

Nice day!

--
Adam Visegradi