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Operating Systems Software Linux

Linux From Scratch 5.0 Book Released 32

Posted by timothy from the uphill-both-ways-and-liked-it dept.
Mecha-A writes "Linux From Scratch 5.0 was released earlier this month, incorporating GRUB as a bootloader, GNU coreutils, GCC 3.3, and lots of other package upgrades among other improvements. If you haven't tried it, LFS is a procedural outline for building a Linux system from the ground up. For those who can't get enough customizability..."
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Linux From Scratch 5.0 Book Released More

Linux From Scratch 5.0 Book Released

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  • I've always wanted to learn how Linux was written, FROM SCRATCH!

    I hope there will be book about GNU/Linux from scratch soon.

    (awaits the flame about old smelling men with beards, and so on)
  • About a month ago, I tried out LFS 4.1 and was very happy with it. (Wish I had known LFS 5 was coming so soon. I might have waited) I'm new to Linux and it helped me get a handle on a lot of commands that I probably would not have learned for quite a while longer had I not tried it. I'm currently in the middle of using the BLFS (Beyond Linux from Scratch) to add in the necessary tools to use my LFS system as my main linux system.

    For others new to linux, I would recommend it. All you need is:
    - A spare parti
    • My experience also, albeit not with LFS 4.1. I tried LFS a couple of years ago, and I don't remember the version exactly. It's excellent as a learning tool, and I recommend it to every newbie with a tech vein (i.e. if you want to look under the hood, this is one of the best tools).

      However, for a long running system, LFS is way too time consuming. I switched to Gentoo [gentoo.org] after a while, with all the customization, at a fraction of the time cost.

  • It seems like it has been updated very regularly, too.
  • Well, right now as in I started almost 24 hours ago compiling stuff. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great idea; so great in fact that I'm building it on a P-III 500. Which is something I'd strongly recommend against if you're in any sort of a rush. Of course, GCC gets compiled 4 times i think (three when it's bootstrapped, and again when it's built using the new toolchain), glibc gets compiled and tested twice. Compiling doesn't take so long compared to testing it. Later on I'll be building Perl, X

    • I've seen this all before... Oh yeah: that's what Slackware was about. You see, real hackers installed Linux the hard way, and SLACKERS used Slackware. You can slack off your installation... Red Hat was (as far as I can remember) based on Slackware, which left much to be desired back in the day.

      Now we come full circle. May I interest you in trying FreeBSD 4.x? Have I mentioned the PORTS tree?

  • http://www.gentoo.org [gentoo.org]

    /obligatory
    • If you are lazy like me, Gentoo is great. If you want to learn the guts of Linux, LFS wins far ahead. Cheers!
    • I'm interested, but I have a question:

      I've got an nforce2 motherboard with an onboard 3com ethernet card that wasn't added to the 3c59c module until 2.4.21 or so. As I understand it, Gentoo uses 2.4.20. I would therefore not be able to access the net and download all the required packages if I did a stage1 or stage2 build.

      Am I missing something, or would I have to wait for another release that uses 2.4.22/2.6.x? I guess I'll just fiddle with my LFS system until then...
      • Gentoo can use whichever kernel source you want. You're correct that "gentoo-sources", the one generally recommended by the Gentoo team, is still at 2.4.20. But there's also pfeifer-sources, at 2.4.21. There are also ebuilds for the vanilla-sources 2.4.22.

        Personally, I use mm-sources -- 2.6.0test8-mm2 currently. Been using it for almost three weeks, works fine. (Tried to upgrade to test9-mm1, had mouse trouble, so I downgraded again.)
    • I tore down my LFS system for Gentoo on my laptop. While I like Gentoo, frankly I missed my LFS system. Once you have it going, it's really not that much more trouble than Gentoo. Granted, I don't think I'd bother using it for a server.
  • How to create your own distro from scratch.

    Hell or how about how to make a bootable cdrom for installing your distro.

    I've looked but no such luck. Maybe the google nazis can find something to help out!
    • just builds this and that on top of LFS. Try this [linuxfromscratch.org] for starters.
      As to a bootable cdrom how about this? [tldp.org]

      Google nazis? is that a sequitur?
      • I assume he means so that when he has his LFS system just the way he wants it, he can create a CD that will let him install it on anything he wants. It wouldn't really work, though, what with the hardware-specific tweaks LFS puts in.
        • Works fine. The only HW specific tweaks IIRC are those you choose for your kernel. So build all the modules and write a script that lets you choose which ones you really want when you boot your CD. Et voila, your own distro.
          • If you go with the most general tweaking, yeah. But, for example, I compiled all my programs with the -march=athlon flag, which means I get a slight performance boost, but my system would not play well with older intel systems. I'm just saying that since one of the key philosphies of LFS is a system customized to exactly your setup, it seems counter-intuitive to make a generic distro out of it.
    • Just boot with Tom's Rescue Disk.

      You can use it to format a hard disk, fdisk etc.
      Then mount the cdrom with your distro
      and copy the files.
      Call lilo from your distro using chroot
      to finalise the thing, and voila' your distro is ready.

      Sure, it's not your neighbourhood friendly installer, but it works fine.

  • LFS 4.1 (Score:3, Informative)

    by NegativeK ( 547688 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `neiraket'> on Wednesday November 12, 2003 @04:49PM (#7456801) Homepage
    I must say, I've installed LFS 4.0 and 4.1 on a few machines, and it's taught me a _lot_ about Linux. I wasn't totally ignorant before, but I now know a bit more about compilation flags, standard directory structures, etc. It is, of course, a long and sometimes painful install - which is why I highly recommend booting from Knoppix to do the installation, as you'll get lots of things to toy with while you're waiting for some of the longer things to compile. =) Of course, that which really sucks is the fact that I don't want to reinstall until 2.6 becomes stable, and I can run XFS on my box.. ;.; Oh well. Hopefully that won't be too far off.

    On the major tips side of things, if you've never done LFS before, make sure you download and install ssh for scp and sftp or lynx/links before booting into it. LFS is bare to the point of having no www, ftp, or nfs utilities, which can be annoying. =p Anyways, for those brave few souls, good luck, and happy compiling!
  • I created several bash scripts that automate the process for me. It works pretty good and was easy to do. Every time a new edition is released I just update my scripts and then reinstall. The think I like best about LFS is the system in the end is configured to your liking. It takes time but gets you a very customized system.
    • Amen to that. The things I love most about LFS are the way that there are no dependancy problem, and the fact that there are never any missing headers. The only two pieces of software on my system that I haven't compiled myself are the Nvidia drivers and Opera 7, and both of them are pretty much self-contained. So long, Debian/Redhat circular dependencies and missing devel packages! Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out!

      Also, the Beyond LFS [linuxfromscratch.org] hints are a great resource even if you don't use LFS. Sho

      • I thought LFS was great, right up to the point that I had to uninstall stuff. I can't see any reliable way to do it (make uninstall isn't always implemented well).

        Ever since I got a broadband connection, I've been using Gentoo. This doesn't make any sense to me, but I swear Gentoo runs slower than LFS, which leads me to my other LFS complaint: any peculiarities to your system need to be documented thoroughly by you.

        I love LFS, but after a point, I just get tired of being a full-time, unpaid sysadmin.

        • I use Epkg [uiuc.edu], an Encap-compliant manager, along with a typical install command of "PREFIX=/temp/usr/local make install", and then I move the contents of /temp/usr/local into /usr/local/encap/[package name]-[package version], then typed "epkg [package name]". All Epkg does is manage symlinks. There's no database to corrupt or dependencies to worry about.

          Almost all programs that can be installed with the "./configure ; make ; make install" dance work fine with Epkg. Gnome is an exception, with that miserable S

    • Re:Automate with Bash Scripts (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think your scripts should be submitted to LFS itself as examples for others.
      • I actually used somebody else's scripts a long time ago and can't remember the original authors name otherwise I would be happy to post them. Lots of people other than me have their own scripts for doing the same thing, in fact there is a project called ALFS (Automated Linux From Scratch).

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