Setting up repositories.

I just saw in the Distrowatch comments that you may need a hand setting up a repo for this. There are a few options that vary in the degree of time/effort/cost associated therein.

1. It's ridiculously easy to set up a repository in Dropbox, but I rather seriously doubt you'll be using this option due to you already capping their transfer limit. There's an article over at peppermintos.us that describes in detail how to do this.

2. The second easiest way is to set up a Launchpad PPA. This isn't the most professional looking of options, but the PPA system is positively fantastic for repo hosting. Make sure your packaging skills are up to snuff as it'll reject anything that's not spot on when it comes to your build process (I like this because it keeps me from cutting corners on anything). The downside is that lots of people use their build system and if it gets backed up you can potentially have to wait a while (this is generally only an issue right before Ubuntu drops new releases). Peppermint uses Launchpad for it's repositories.

3. You can also use a package called reprepro to host your own repo on your own server. It'll need to be a Debian/Ubuntu/derivative system as it's quite a pain to get reprepro installed on anything else (though it's certainly possible). From there just make sure it has a public facing webserver and use similar instructions to what was described in option 1. Reprepro isn't picky about how packages are built so as long as you can somehow squeeze it into .deb format you can publish it (though it's highly recommended you following proper packaging standards anyway). Linux Mint uses hosted reprepro for it's repositories.

-----

How exactly are you going about building your .iso images? Also, Mint has a lot of built in tools to make package building fairly painless. Since your coming off of Mint 9 Fluxbox all of this will be there from the get go. The in house tool at Mint for building .iso images doesn't seem to play nice with Mint 9 Fluxbox so I "hand built" the release off of what was originally Lubuntu. I have some build notes if you need them.

Thanks for the tips, I basically just do ui design and need serious help on art, coding and packaging. I don't have a server so option three is out. I truly have no idea how to package a .deb (although I could learn) or what I should package so that upgrades could be done properly. I could always also just have one release, although that probably won't end well. I'm using Remastersys to remaster.

My best advice is to cut your teeth learning stuff such as coding and packaging while contributing to another distro. Something with predefined quality assurance standards and something with deadlines. Building a distro is easy, maintaining one is less so. It's imperative that all changes to the .iso are in a packaged format as it's virtually impossible to effectively roll out updates to changes made otherwise.

Let me know if you need anything specific. Not trying to be discouraging or anything, just trying to help.

Thanks for being so helpful. I'm not really qualified for any of this, I just like designing the system. I'll try some of your suggestions, but I'm not quite sure how you package changes.

Every aspect of the default system is stored in one or more files somewhere. In order to ensure the maintainability of a distro, every file in the .iso should either be a part of a software package, or be generated/controlled by a file in a software package. When you take an existing system and change it to be another distro, ideally you should either completely git rid of the default configuration packages that exist already and replace them with your own packages containing your own default configuration (preferred), or update the existing configuration packages to a new version (not preferred, but it still works). This way if you need to change something in the future, you can quickly and easily roll it out with no more than an update to one of those packages.

Take Mint 9 Fluxbox as an example. You'll find mint-fluxbox-default-settings, mint-artwork-fluxbox, mint-fm2, mint-info-fluxbox, mintinput, and mint-fluxbox-livecd that were built specifically for this edition. Then you'll find tint2, fluxbox, chestnut-dialer, chestnut-dialer-gtk2, and vino-xfce that were updated/imported for this edition. Lastly you'll find fbrandr which is a fork of lxrandr that was put together specifically for this edition. Digging deeper than this, there are other Mint specific packages that come from the main repository that are present in all Mint 9 editions. Beyond that there are Ubuntu packages.

Tear apart mint-fluxbox-default-settings and mint-artwork-fluxbox and see how they contain almost all of the details for the user interface in that edition.