Hey everyone! I'm venturing into creating my own mobile operating system and could use some guidance, as I'm not very experienced with Linux yet. I'm working with a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) using Raspberry Pi Lite as my base OS, and I've installed Wayfire to handle the UI. For my first beta, I'm aiming to implement the following features:
- A status bar
- A navigation bar
- Full-screen apps
- A virtual keyboard
- A home grid and app menu grid
I really believe in the power of community support, like Linus Torvalds does! Apologies if my English isn't the best. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!
4 Answers
Are you looking for help with the design, coding, and testing of these features? It sounds like you're diving into a big project!
You might find AntiX helpful for your project. It's not solely focused on Raspberry Pi, but it's great for building a customized OS. Just boot the ISO, customize it, and they have a live USB remaster option to guide you through creating a version you can share!
For a solid start, consider using Xfce with a panel for your status/navigation bar and either Xorg or Wayland as your display server. For the virtual keyboard, the postmarketOS community has some great resources that you can leverage. And for your app grid, think about using large icons with a launcher like `whisker-menu`. Customizing a lighter distro based on Xfce could work well too!
You might want to check out the Linux From Scratch manuals. They have tons of info on how to dig into source code and adapt it. You could even look into Graphene OS for more inspiration!
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll definitely take a look at those manuals. <3
Not exactly! I'm really just trying to find a good starting point, how to go about this, and maybe some examples that can help me understand better.