I've made it through chapter 5 and everything seemed to go smooth. Any errors I got could be traced to mistakes I made, so I'm pretty confident that chapter 5 is solidly complete.

I started Chapter 6, have done the chroot and other prep work (directory tree, mount proc, mtab, bash and sh symlinks, /etc/passwd and /etc/group) and now come to the first "installation" I must do.

Prologue
However, the unpacked lfs-packages-4.0.tar tarball is back in /home/lfs on the "Base" system, so I need to copy it over to the new, post-chroot, system.

I opened another xterm, signed on doing su - lfs, and then tried cp lfs-packages-4.0.tar /mnt/lfs, but I get a Permission denied error.

So, I went back to my base system and signed on as root doing su -, and then was able to copy the tarball over. I just copied it to /mnt/lfs.
End Prologue

Now in the original xterm, I'm "root" (but prompt='I have no name!') in the post-chroot system and I'm wondering in what directory should that tarball reside and be unpacked?

Also, as what user? On the post-chroot system, the book doesn't really mention using an "lfs" user like we did in Chapter 5. If "root" unpacks the tarball, and hence becomes owner of the resulting linux-packages-4.0 directory, won't only "root" be able to unpack the .tar.bz2 packages inside? And then, if so, won't only "root" be able to ./configure, make, make install?

I've read ahead in Chapter 6 and I don't see anything about ever creating another user. So I guess my questions boil down to
1) is everything in Chapter 6 performed as "root"?
2) if not, what isn't?
3) where and how do you create the new user to perform those things that are the answer to my question #2?

Thanks!

1) everything in chapter 6 is performed by root. 2&3) N/A

the whole idea of the chroot environment is so that you can be root without risking damaging the host system

OK, Kev, thanks for that explanation.