As an excercise to help me become better acquainted with linux, I'm going to be building my own private distro.

I have 4 main goals and reasons for this:

1. I need a firewall/gateway for my home network to replace my grandmother's old WinXP box (old: something like 667 or 977 MHz), which is currently acting as the gateway/firewall

3. I also intend to set up a server of various sorts (web, ftp, DNS, DHCP, etc) on the network to learn some of the freeware server and database programs available.

4. This is also intended to become my main use OS (well, at least until I get SuSE 8.2).

2. The current range of choices in most distributions is, to say the least, daunting. By doing this I hope to become better acquainted with at least some of these tools and programs, without having to dig myself out of a slew of programs and tools I may never have a use for.

"OK, great. Now, why should I care?"

As this is in part a learning tool for myself and I'm not familiar with many linux programs, I'd like suggestions for which programs to include. Main areas of interest are:

web/ftp browsers
servers
media programs (sound, video, graphics, etc)
games
office/productivity programs
security programs/tools (firewall, IDS, etc)
administration programs/tools (rpm, user-conf, etc)
desktops (kde, enlightenment, gnome. etc)

This is of course, not a limiting list (mostly just the first things that come to mind). Please suggest whatever you feel should go into this. When I finally set on a solid list, I'll post it here (if this gets enough attention) for review. Thank ahead of time for your comments and suggestions.




NOTES:
1. This is not meant to be a commercial distribution, so programs with liscencing and copyright issues are ok
2. If you'd like a copy when I'm done, PM me. If I get enough support for it, I'll see about getting it mirrored somewhere for use.
3. Yes, I know UnError is working on their own distro, This is just an excercise for myself.
4. I am also aware that this could take until SuSE 9.4 for me to finish. I have several computers and several OSs, so I shall be working on learning how to use linux at the same time as I am learning to create a distro.
5. If it's recieved well enough, who'd like the idea of an (semi)official AO distro?

again, thank you.