Thinking of using CentOS as a host for a Linux Appliance. I am used to building Embedded Linux Systems and there the approach is to create the a directory on the development machine and "get files "that are to be on the target machine into that directory. This usually being termed as building the root file system. Also in the embedded systems approach we build from source and usually during the configure steps of package we can specify where the end binaries/libraries need to be copies. So for Cent OS thinking of using a similar approach with the difference that I don't want to build all packages from source. 1)Use the binrary rpms and install to a directory on a development machine using the rpm --prefix option. Not sure yet how to specify to create and use an rpm database on the development machine as opposed to a database on the development machine. Is this really a sensible approach or just using something like Kickstart? 2) There might be some packages that I want to build from source. Then I am thinking I would need the exact compiler used to compile the binary rpms. How would I obtain the compiler and environment used to build the CentOS binary rpms? Thx, -Venkat