A disorganized collection of random notes that might be helpful. Thanks to Rick Philbrick for getting me to start this. Prebuild bpms are in i386 and ppc. git is my git working tree; packages are available there unpacked. There are a few ways to start off. If you want a purpose-built server, take busybox, add a vmlinuz, then add whatever other servers you want. fhs would be good if you need the standard directory heirarchy, bent-dev is good if you want a reasonable fully-populated /dev with 18 thousand odd inodes eaten under it. My linux-$version kernels work for the specific apps I've built them for, they are fairly tightly tuned down, odds are against their exactly meeting your needs, either build a kernel completely separately or set up a dev environment (below) and use it to make an adjusted linux-$version package with your own config file (run "make menuconfig" or "make xconfig", then copy ".config" to src/linux-$version-config). A dev env is easy, grab a copy of everything and unpack them all. "everything" is simplest; if you want to pick and choose there's no reason not to, clearly lots of the packages won't be needed to satisfy build-time dependencies, and Bent Linux is conspicuously close to completely free of install-time dependencies. I'm hoping to add build-time dependency documentation to the bpm system soon. I periodically run ls -d /var/lib/bpm/* | xargs -l bpmbuild to rebuild the whole thing, largely to make sure everything still builds clean. I've not yet written an installer. For bootstrapping a standalone Bent Linux cleanly onto new hardware, with no trace of the hosting system, I take some existing distro (I tend to have Red Hats of various vintages lying about), install that, create a busybox initrd with something like: dd if=/dev/zero of=initrd bs=1024k count=4 mke2fs initrd mount -o loop initrd /mnt bzip2 -d initrd.img and make that bootable with a suitable vmlinuz (one that doesn't use modules). I'll either add the inodes I need of /dev, or else just make an empty dir and use busybox's devfsd plus devfs in the kernel. Once I've booted up on the initrd I can repartition the drive, unpack the bpms I want to populate it with (from another drive, or removable media, or over the net), and make it bootable with lilo. Until bpmbuild gets a custom cpio writer that can control perms, you need to sudo bpmpkgfix after building; and similarly, there are four bpms --- bent-dev, bent-passwd, fhs, and sudo --- that cannot be built with bpmbuild, since the content they have to deliver cannot be created in a cpio.bz2 using standard tools by a non-priv user (or, in the case of fhs, since bpmbuild doesn't scoop empty directories). I've got a wickedly tiny trimmed termcap/terminfo database in bent-termdb, basically just defines vt100. If you need anything else, you'll need to get the entries from one of the standard databases.