Can I make a 30 Hour Senior Project from LFS/BLFS?
 

As a requirement for graduation at the high school I go to, we need to complete a thirty hour Senior Project. At first I considered making my own LiveCD (www.linux-live.org), but then decided I would learn more about compiling and how a distro works under the hood using LFS.

Here is my question: Thirty hours is the minimum amount of time to be spent on our Senior Project. Do you think building a LFS system, and adding networking capability, as well as X with Gnome or XFCE, would that fill up thirty hours no problem?

Thank you very much for your time.

I guess it would depend on your level of experience, really. It won't take 30 hours for somebody who already has done it before; unless you are counting the actual time it takes to compile the software, which seems like it would be cheating, honestly. Of course, it also depends on the level of functionality you are shooting for, a simplistic system is going to take less time to put together than something that packs everything in.

I don't see any reason that you can't still pursue the live CD route, just base it on a LFS system rather than an existing distro. Certainly that will suck up some more time.

I've never done it before, so it would take a while. As you said, making a "full" distro would take longer, and I think my goal will be to make a full desktop OS (not sure what they call them, if it's desktop OS, or desktop replacement...). That would involve things like wireless drivers, OpenOffice.org, and USB flashdrive drivers. I figure with all of that, and figuring out a widescreen, I should be able to fill up 30 hours. Just reading the books takes a couple hours.

Thank you very much for your comments.

The time it takes to produce a functioning system using lfs depends a lot on the hardware it is being built on.

my old pentium-mmx laptop @ 266 MHz with 128mb ram for instance, takes 12 hours just to bootstrap gcc on pass one of chapter 5. to get through the lfs book is literally two weeks of constant work compiling.

using the jalfs scripts, it will do everything automatically, but it's still based on what hardware you are using.

this is just lfs, which is fully command line functional, with networking.
adding blfs adds the time it takes for each addon package you want to install.