Linux from scratch
 

Has anyone tried that Linux from scratch and if so, how did you get on with it?

www.linuxfromscratch.org

L8rs

RecoilUK

about to start one here in the next month or so basically base mine off of slackware if i can.. but there are others, I know Cragstar has his i read in one of his posts.. and a few others..

I'm starting one also this week and also using Slack as my base. You'll first need to go to the LFS site and make sure you d/l all of the required programs and then start printing out the destructions and doing what it says. :) finegan is doing one and has already compiled everything (he's using Slack also). He may have some more info. And as said above Cragstar has a working LFS. Perhaps an LFS forum. Hmmmm...?

I'm going to do one when I get my new hard drives later this month, version 3.1 of LFS has just been released, make sure you get the latest.

Yer kidding, oh man, I hope there isn't too big of a change! LOL
At least i've only gotten as far as making my directory structure. Thanks for the note Aussie!

Weird...

I finished LFS from the CVS tree two days ago. I had about a day long fight with the init scripts, but other than that it was rather simple. I also had a big issue with the .75Gb recomendation. I gave the partition a gig and constantly had to move post-compiled source back and forth from the mounted lfs partition to the mother hen machine's partition. Give yourself 2-3 Gb and you'll have plenty of crawl space.

For instance, the next to last thing you compile before you chroot into the lfs mount is gcc. The source and the post-compiled binaries are 350+megs. Next there's glibc, source and post-compiled libraries 500+ megs. If you have the kernel source on the machine at the same time... that's it, three things, 1Gb+.

Oh, and other things compile really easily after LFS works. The first daemon I threw on last night, ssh, after adding zlib and ssl, worked staright off... well... after adding /usr/local/sbin(and bin) to root's path.

Oh... with 15 processes running and the fact I went for a rather slim kernel... the machine this is on, a P1 200Mhz, 64Meg RAM is acting faster than my roomate's K7 Athlon box. I hope I can keep it this quick all the way through installing X.

Oh, and this is the last oh... when you're done, name it. Not the machine, because that should already have a name, but your flavor of LFS. Wait until after you've dropped a lot of stuff on it and it has a personality. Here's mine:

Plebian v.1A6*

The version number is the code I punch into the world's nastiest coffee machine at work every morning I come in feeling like dreck because I was up playing with this crap until 4am.

Alright... I need to work today, or something; and for a play by play, Taz and I have been chattering about this like a pair of soccer moms for the past few days here .

Cheers,

Finegan

Soccer moms hehe..I like that! =) Last night I officially started compiling my LFS. I decided to update my source to LFS 3.1 and get everything I was missing, which wasn't too bad. I will say right now, if I have to type ./configure --prefix=/LFS/usr --disable-nls && one more time, i'm gonna puke. Oops, there went the cookies! LOL The 1G t-bird performed quite well so far with the compiles and like you suggested, have a good 3.5Gigs to work with. I was a bit tired by 1am so today I should get quite a bit done. Sounds like the LFS system is pretty lean and fast from your post, i'm looking forward to that. I already have a good set of names to choose from when I name mine, so we'll see what comes of that. Thanks for the tips and being a guinea pig of sorts and posting the whatnots. :) I'll keep up the posting as a good soccer mom would, gossiping about thier child's super-soccer abilities while the rest of the moms watch and gossip about how my child actually sucks! LOL

this LFS thing seems to be like a jewel to a magpie... ooh that's nice.. want it.... :D I guess i'll do one in a few months.

But people have mentioned basing their distro off of slackware or such like, and i'm kinda curious as to what that's really meant to mean. is it a case of just installignn the same packages? Surely there's no need to base it off of anything...?

And when is there going to be an RPM based LFS? ;)

You need a distro base to create an LFS because if you didn't there'd be no way to install anything. Another way to call it is the host system, which hosts the mounted LFS partition to work from until you are done and ready to boot it proper. I used Slack because that's the distro I use. Others I dunno, gotta ask 'em. It has nothing to do with software so much since if you want an LFS system, you'll need the software packages IT requires. You're distro may already have some. But that's not the point of a base system. And if you want an RPM based LFS, i'm sure someone must have made one by now, or if not, you could. :)

I might have used "basing" in the wrong context. You need a compiler and a library in order to compile a shell, sed, mawk, perl, heck another compiler! None of LFS is actually based on whatever machine, for lack of a better term, gives birth to it. Then, after you've gotten your own library and gcc, you cut the chord, chroot into the LFS partition, and rebuild the damn thing all over again so its not based on anything... other than LFS. The whole point to an LFS is that everything was compiled for and by that machine, so having an RPM based LFS is ridiculous... that's just a regular distrobution without some cute installer to unpackage it all for you.

When LFS is done, it isn't really based on anything. It is a base. Heck, there's no telnet, no easy script to add users, no ssh, no apache, no X-windows, no PAN, nada, nothing, zip, bleach. Its one of the ultimate learning tools for linux. Two days ago I knew I had to compile ssl to compile ssh, but I didn't know I needed something called zlib. Go figure.

Alright, I gotta get back to slacking off at work.

Word,

Finegan

Hi guys

OK, I think i,m going to give this LFS a shot since its the ultimate way to learn Linux, and i,m also gonna ask if we can have a dedicated forum for it to. But being totally ignorant when it comes to Linux I have a question, when you have completed the install, how can u get rid off your base system for more disk space without destroying your newly installed LFS system?

And also can you guys give me some pointers in the directory structure for the LFS system, space inst a problem as my HD is 10.1gb but I also have to install my base system to dont forget.

Thx guys

Good luck

RecoilUK

The LFS book will take you through all of that. From creating the directory structure to rebooting for the first time. Yes, you can get rid of the base once you have LFS running well enough or however you like it. I just got mine done and it only takes the better part of two maybe three days depending on how fast you type and coffee abundance! :) When you are done with LFS, it will have you installing LILO from there instead of the base (your choice there). So you can boot into LFS or what you name it and just delete the base. Just make sure you give LFS at least 3-4Gigs of space to work with, without having space problems, give it more if you plan on installing the X-window system, etc...First get the book for www.linuxfromscratch.org and print it out or read it online or download it. You'll see it's not as daunting as you may think. And DEFINATELY download the lfs-bootscripts, that'll save you 5 straight days of scripting. The book is written well so give 'er a try.

Hallelujah, sing it brother.

That's really all I had to say, although what I found helpful on day 3 (yeah, same amount of time here), was having another machine next to the LFS box to check out the site from. It made things dink easy.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi

Thx for the reply

One more question?
So I can delete the base system safely enough, but what about maximising my new $LFS partition to use up all the disk space, is this also possible with a program like cfdisk without losing any data?

Thx again

RecoilUK

Use GNU Parted
 

If you want to use up the rest of your harddisk space, use a little and stable program called parted.
search alltehweb.com - you'll seee it in the first 5 hits.