1. Introduction

There may be several reasons for making your own CDs. Perhaps you're a cheapskate and want to save the cost of the Red Hat distribution. Or, perhaps you want to include in your CDs the latest distribution with all the current updates. This is highly relevant, because after each major release of the Red Hat distribution, there have been loads of updates, several of which are security related. Just take a look at the errata page. Or maybe you want to customize the default installation adding a few packages not present in the default tree and unselecting the installation of some packages which are otherwise included in the default setup.

This is what you will be taught in the next sections (hopefully). I will use the i386 architecture and releases 7.3, 8.0 and 9 of the distribution in the examples. The notes related to the previous releases (<=6.1) were contained in a previous version of this document and were compiled by the original authors. The notes related to release 6.2 are based on tests I've not completed (and I don't know if I ever will) and some documents you can find linked in the Related documentation section. The procedure given in the following sections for RedHat 7.3 and 8.0 is likely to work on all platforms supported by Red Hat (Alpha, ppc, etc.), for all the 7.x (and maybe 8.x/9 in a not too far future) releases, but I have only tested it on the i386 platform with Redhat Linux 7.3, 8.0 and 9 (I would be interested in additional information).

The operations described have legal implications, meaning you cannot redistribute the CDs as RedHat Linux if you modify them in ways not compliant to Redhat trademark policy. To make them legally redistributable, you should always comply with the guidelines stated on the RedHat website .

Always remember to set the variables in the rhcd.conf file and export the RHCDPATH environment variable before running the scripts you will find throughout the rest of this document and related to releases >=6.2 of RedHat Linux. An example rhcd.conf file, which should be well commented, is provided with the scripts.