Conclusion

It is not only feasible to create your own Linux system from scratch, but also your custom installation diskettes. This way it becomes possible to make installation diskettes for machines that are no longer supported by modern Linux distributions. It is also possible to use this system to install special-purpose Linux distributions on a large number of machines in a company. If you wondered: that's the profit part of the title. If you managed to read this text so far, you obviously understand the fun part.

A few concluding remarks:

• Shell scripting and dialog may not be very user friendly, but it is possible to create a usable installer with them. Debian has done this for a while.
• I am apparently far removed from the professional level Linux installers. I've not yet developed scripts to select and install modules satisfactorily. My current diskettes have network support, but no practical way to load the necessary modules for the Ethernet card. Maybe I should borrow some Debian installation scripts.
• It is still possible to support 486 machines with 8kB of RAM, even with the latest kernel.
• With kernel 2.4 is not really possible to create single diskette installation disks if a reasonably featureful kernel is desired. Two diskette systems and 2.88MB diskette images (for a bootable CD) are still possible.
• This text is a general plan to create installation disks. Many features can be added or removed. Network support could be removed or on the other hand we could add a DHCP client and a small web browser. Support for reiserfs (or other advanced file systems) could be added (you need kernel support and the utilities to create the file systems). Maybe you want a different editor or even a Basic interpreter. It's all yours to decide.