[Gloucs] Gloucs LUG Newbie - introducing myself and request for help

[Gavin Nelmes-Crocker]

Hi

I joined the list the other day and was hoping to come to the meeting but
work took over.

To introduce myself

I've used and worked with Linux for the past 4 years in a pre-sales capacity
and a technical one first for Cobalt Networks and then for another start-up
Antefacto that sadly went down.  I now work for an internet filtering and
anti-spam company.

The result of all this is that I am now using Linux a lot more and getting
into areas beyond my depth but trying to learn.

I have one goal at the moment that I need specific help with and as such a
small fee may be payable as we would probably need to meet up and I have a
time requirement - as in sooner rather than later. Alternatively we might be
able to arrange a hardware gift as I have some Cobalt equipment.

I need to build a customised Linux distribution.  I have sort of built one
in a roundabout way based on Red Hat 8 utilising various Howtos on the web
however I am failing in some areas and I suspect that it is due to a
combination of my lack of knowledge as well as not setting up the build
system correctly.  Here are the various urls I have been referring to.

http://256.com/gray/docs/rh_boot/
http://www.beau.org/~jmorris/linux/whitebox/howto.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6473
http://sweb.cz/Frantisek.Rysanek/splash/isolinux-splash-HOWTO.html

Good thing I printed some of them off - as some of the others appear to have
disappeared.

I have a list of other requirements goals etc which I've included below in
case anyone wants to give them a go - we are only a small company (3 people
in the UK) and I am having to be a developer when I'm not.

Transparency
php coding
Web Design
rpm building
Firewall - IP Tables
Boot/Build from USB disk - I have a 256Mb one to play with and a dev box to
test it with.

Regards

Gavin