Welcome To Seed Linux
When it comes to building tailored servers, nothing beats the flexibility of a source-based distribution like Gentoo Linux. The ability to build a server to meet your exact needs provides a real competitive edge in business. The ability to reproduce it over and over again ... that adds real agility to your operations.
Seed Linux provides quality releases that can be used to quickly 'seed' a server or workstation for specific purposes. Seed Linux is built on top of Gentoo Linux.
What Are We About?
We're currently exploring ways to quickly 'seed' fully-working copies of Gentoo onto boxes.
Generating these seeds has a couple of purposes:
1. Offering fully configured function-orientated expansions on the official stage3 tarball.
Most people need to configure a standard server or desktop, LAMP is a good example of a server setup. A lot of us are still reinventing the wheel and using different configurations. By offering a pre-configured seed with a collection of tools we planning to provide an example setup. We hope that these seeds will grow into a reference deployment.
2. Create meta-ebuilds for both the package-sets and the associated configurations
This will enable others to choose between using the entire seed, just the packages without the config or their own system setup with the seed's packages and configuration.
3. Document the process of generating such a seed and deploying it.
Everyone in a multiple server-maintenance situation needs a repeatable method of generating server setups So far everyone is using his/her own method of generating and deploying these seeds/server-images. Many people have written custom deployment systems. By leveraging existing gentoo tools such as catalyst, overlays, layman and custom profiles, we hope to ease the burden and offer a well-documented way of installing multiple servers with a similar setup.
News
- Follow the news about Seed Linux on Stuart's blog
- Follow the news about Gentoo Seeds Installer on rullzer's blog
FAQ
HOWTOS
- Working with Catalyst to create Stage4 tarballs.
- How to install the LAMP Server Seed.
- How to create a Xen Image with Seed Linux installed inside it.
Seeds In Gestation
- Seed Linux Portage Server Edition
- Seed Linux LAMP Server Edition
- Seed Linux VPN Server Edition
- Requests / ideas for new seeds
- Planned features for future releases
Guidelines / Technology For Creating Seeds
We're still figuring out the best way to create seeds for Gentoo. Our current thinking and ideas will probably change with experience.
Getting Involved
We're excited by the possibilities of seeding. If you want to get involved with an existing seed - or to establish a new seed, please contact Stuart. We keep a list of what needs doing, and who is doing what.
The Seed Linux project is brought to you by the Seed Linux team.
