A simple Wander Linux builder implemented in Python.

Wander Linux is a linux distribution based on the Linux From Scratch project. It provides a simple, fast, linux distribution tailored specifically to your device's hardware by compiling each package from scratch. All of the configuration files are easily changable and human-readable, providing great opportunities for customisation!

The Wander Linux builder downloads source packages and uses those to construct a temporary system upon which Wander will be built. Once this is done, packages are added to the system as they are needed.

All information about what packages are needed where and what they need to do are stored in a series of YAML files. This means that anybody can change their Wander to meet their exact requirements without having to delve heavily into code.

The Wander Linux builder is written entirely in Python 3 and tested using Python 3.7, although other Python 3 versions will probably work.

Two special python packages are required;

• pyparted, a Python wrapper for fdisk, and
• pyyaml, a Python YAML interpreter.

Both of these dependencies can be installed using pip3 install pyparted pyyaml.

The other dependencies are inherent to the operating system build process, and can thus vary from build to build. These dependencies can be found in prerequisites.yaml, and are tested whenever the Wander Linux builder starts up.

Alternatively, the entire system can be built using Docker, being built using the included scripts and the Dockerfile to compile the image. If this is the case, the only dependency is the docker runtime - everything else is housed inside the image.

This system has been tested on Ubuntu 19.10 and Slackware 14.2, on 64- and 32-bit hardware, respectively. If you are using another distribution, you may need an additional amount of tweaking, but it should nevertheless be possible to run this smoothly.

Wander requires a dedicated partition on which its filesystem will be built. Once it has completed, you can archive this system and use it elsewhere, but a partition with at least 12 GB of free space is required for the build process. The final system will be much smaller than this, but this allows for debug headers and sources to be stored, before they are later stripped.

The Wander Linux builder can be run either natively on a Linux distribution, or inside a Docker container, allowing an extra layer of protection should something go wrong.

To run the Wander Linux build system natively, issue the following as root:

python3 wander-py/core.py

To run the Wander Linux build system using a Docker container, the build and run scripts can be used.

For Linux, these commands are as follows:

./scripts/build.sh
./scripts/run.sh

And on Windows systems, the same can be achieved using:

.\scripts\build.bat
.\scripts\run.bat

The Windows build system requires that a folder called Wander be present in the user's home directory. This folder is where Wander Linux will be built so that it can be retrieved later.

The build scripts copy the contents of this repository into the /root folder of the image so that the code can be run in that new environment. In order to save having to download the packages anew for every build, we recomment that you copy your sources directory into your local copy of this repository after your first run so that the sources are preserved.

Once the build system has been started up, you will be able to choose a Wander version to build, whereafter the system will check that you meet the prerequisites for the build, and find your partition (if you are not running in Docker). This process will take quite a while, and it is advised that you allow it to run through the entire build without stopping. If you do need to stop however, you can skip packages which have already been built by adding skip: true underneath the package name in the respective YAML file.

Please make a backup of your system before you run this - a badly configured Wander build script can destroy your machine. Additionally, always ensure that you are either building a release of Wander, or are on the stable branch of this repository.

Whether you want to develop the core builder itself, work on new Wander distributions, or just maintain packages in the older ones, feel free to fork this repo and submit your pull requests. Similarly, anybody is free to create issues and we'll try to resolve them as soon as possible.