I wrote this article because I had found a couple of documents on the Internet describingthis kind of thing but they all seemed incomplete in some way. The document written byFrank Kruchio was more specifically written for Suse. Juergen Helmer made a post toPCLinuxOnline that was more along the lines of what I wanted to do, but was missing a lotof the detail and had a few omissions that I wanted to document, i.e., the buildenvironment. Juergen's document actually led me to review the Gentoo bootstrap script.The Mandrake RPM HOW-TO was full of useful information, but not written in a easilyunderstood way for non-developers. I referenced those documents below if anybodyreading this is interested in taking a look at them. Additionally, I originally tries this exercise in optimization for the 9.0 version of MandrakeLinux. I wanted to leave myself some detailed instructions for the next time around, so Idecided to put it into a written document. I then thought, since I am going to do thisanyway, I might as well make the document clean and put it out for others that are