Ever since one of my friends saw the iron man movie they have ever been so fascinated with his house causing him to accelerate on one of his projects of building an operating system. Reason being he one day wants a house with its own Linux base operating system to obey all of his commands. So he calls me up one day ask me how does he get started?

I have personally never built an operating system and did some researching and found a voluminous amount of resources. But the best place to  start is at this website http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/. They have a manual which is downloadable on the website that caters to:

LFS teaches people how a Linux system works internally
Building LFS teaches you about all that makes Linux tick, how things work together and depend on each other. And most importantly, how to customize it to your own tastes and needs.

Building LFS produces a very compact Linux system
When you install a regular distribution, you often end up installing a lot of programs that you would probably never use. They’re just sitting there taking up (precious) disk space. It’s not hard to get an LFS system installed under 100 MB. Does that still sound like a lot? A few of us have been working on creating a very small embedded LFS system. We installed a system that was just enough to run the Apache web server; total disk space usage was approximately 8 MB. With further stripping, that can be brought down to 5 MB or less. Try that with a regular distribution.

LFS is extremely flexible
Building LFS could be compared to a finished house. LFS will give you the skeleton of a house, but it’s up to you to install plumbing, electrical outlets, kitchen, bath, wallpaper, etc. You have the ability to turn it into whatever type of system you need it to be, customized completely for you.

LFS offers you added security
You will compile the entire system from source, thus allowing you to audit everything, if you wish to do so, and apply all the security patches you want or need to apply. You don’t have to wait for someone else to provide a new binary package that (hopefully) fixes a security hole. Often, you never truly know whether a security hole is fixed or not unless you do it yourself.

Another tool that will help with you building your operating system is using a virtual machine. This tool also you run multiple operating systems under one environment  you can download the tools for from http://www.vmware.com/ and http://www.virtualbox.org/ (This one runs faster in my opinion).  Also before I set you free on your journey to building an operating system there are some things you might want to take into consideration:

1. Remember this is an operating system which controls your hardware, so it best you test if on spare computer first!
2. Select the main architecture you wish to build it for and go the developer section on their website.
3. Always keep backups of your work
4. Focus on booting it up first and security then you can move onto the cool stuff
5. Have fun!!!