Nokia has been maintaining its own Linux distribution, dubbed Nokia Linux, for quite some time, and while the distribution has been successful, supporting it has become tedious at very least. The current version of Nokia Linuxes build system builds a monolithic distribution. This creates a multitude of problems ranging from having to rebuild all of the distribution's software packages after patching a single package to not being able to efficiently customise images according to user needs. The current version also lacks any kind of stable release management causing every user to either maintain their own stable releases or having to constantly update from the official version. Apart from being too monolithic, the support of the software packages is insufficient. An efficient support team needs to be created to answer any internal support requests Nokia Linux users might have.
In this thesis we first define our corporate environmental needs. We identify three needs: support, storage and security. We then define three methods for organising the support. We compare them then to the current way of delivering support. We conclude that the three methods are probably better than the current one, but more research is needed before any definite answer can be given.
We then define three processes for creating and maintaining an own Linux distribution in our corporate environment. We show two of these processes in action through a proof of concept project. With this project we show that the two processes we tested can be used to create and update an own Linux based distribution image composed of RPM packages. These two processes were tested with multiple tools to show that these processes can be used flexibly and without having to lock into only one set of tools.
