LFS has its own brand new designed website, www.linuxfromscratch.org

yeah, I've been there. It's where I found the LFS howto. Unfortunately, the mirror nearest me (and also with the fastest connection) doesn't have functioning download links. Oh well, after I finish some homework I am going to finish reading the HowTos already mentioned.

That is the Linux Terminal Server Project I mentioned earlier

Also, regarding X running in 4MB. MasterC is right, I was using the laptop in question mostly for an X client only (actually, X server if you want to get technical; the client is the one running the X software, while the server is the one displaying it); however, I did have standalone X and X apps running in only 4MB. With that little, it is extraordinarily sluggish, and thrashes the swapfile, but I am confident that the setup I have would run more than comfortably in 16MB. muLinux comes with X and three window managers, which worked decently on my other 16MB laptop. And keep in mind those are both 486es! For the 4MB one, I was even using the most recent version of Slackware, with its largish 2.4.20 kernel. Using an older kernel and paring down memory usage even further would make it work even better. This story mentions one guy who got X plus Blackbox running in under 800K of resident memory (though he had 32MB to work with).

Anyway, I digress. I just wanted to make the point that X can be perfectly happy with only 16MB RAM. As long as you're not running 20 apps at once, it should be fine. But all this is irrelevant if you don't plan on running X

Ok, I guess the first thing is to decide what you want to go with, and I'd personally say, go for an LFS instead of Diskless on the box itself. You can certainly have plenty of diskless/NFS'd mounts on it, but the experience (IMHO) would be best if LFS was on the firewall, and then for most other things (if you desire X) you run diskless/NFS setups. Here's the diskless How-To:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Diskless-HOWTO.html

Should you want to go all diskless, you should read this one:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Diskless-root-...her-HOWTO.html OR
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Diskless-root-NFS-HOWTO.html
For setting up the / filesystem over NFS.

Anyway, assuming we go LFS on the box, here's how I'd go about it:
Throw in your Gentoo CD, get to the prompt, change your root pass, then start up lynx:
lynx linuxfromscratch.org
And start. Instead of untarring a stage tarball into the filesystem though, you'll take off with LFS from there. You can also/instead just boot up, don't use any of the Gentoo ideas, and just start from ground zero with LFS (probably more beneficial). Then, when it's all done, you should have a working/bootable LFS system, and you can begin with your Firewall needs. No need to go BLFS, other than to get a few text editors, maybe some of the bare minimum other things running as well, DHCP (should you need it) and then begin with IPTables. If you are going to be using a tool, I suggest a look at shorewall OR, since it would fit, you could put Apache on that same box, and setup a remote admin client over a secure web browser. The world is your oyster at that point.

Cool

Step 1... Install Linux.

<< SNIP >>

Step 100... TAKE OVER THE WORLD !!!

Wouldn't it be 101, as the book title would go much better as:
101 steps to World Domination using Linux.



Cool

I'm going to go straight LFS (no Gentoo boot CD). I'll post back the results later. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

AFAIK, you need a host still to do an LFS install. Unless they've conquered how to "install a compiler without a compiler" somehow?

That's where the Gentoo Boot CD comes into play, simply pawning off as a host distro without actually needing one.

Cool

MasterC is correct, you need something to start compiling from.

ok, I will post my results when I have some.