What you are reading right now is one of the two parts that form the Alindis project: the Alindis Documentation.

The Alindis project aims to open the world of GNU/Linux distribution to everyone who is interested to participate. This includes people who just wonder how a GNU/Linux distribution is produced, who have to administrate groups of GNU/Linux systems and want to customize and optimize them in one go, who want to take their GNU/Linux-based office with them in their pockets (without dragging along a notebook), or who are considering starting a marketable distribution and are looking for a starting point.

If you fall into one of these (or similar) groups, then keep reading! This is the manual which reveals and explains the internal mechanisms of current GNU/Linux distributions (such as Debian, Slackware, RedHat), and thus, by teaching you in full detail what's going on inside, allows you to build and distribute a completely customized GNU/Linux distribution of your own.

As mentioned above, the Alindis Documentation is only one part of the Alindis project. The other component is the Alindis Distribution. If you know “Operating Systems: Design and Implementation” by Andrew S. Tanenbaum et al., them you probably can guess what the Alindis Distribution is for. It's purpose is to illustrate the discussed topics and to give an example of how a distribution might look like.