After using Debian for 2 years, I finally feel grown up enough to delve into LFS.

I feel the best approach is to download the LFS livecd, but my bandwidth is limited to 1 Gb per month.

When is the next LFS livecd scheduled to be released? Since I can only proceed very slowly with LFS, I had better start with a brand new release.

The intention of the LFS LiveCD is to provide you with a known good distro. That is, one that has all the packages with correct versions to build LFS on your hard drive not as a way to "get started" with LFS. The current LiveCD coincides with the current stable version of LFS (6.3). If you want the latest LiveCD, you could check it out with subversion

Just make an extra partition on your Debian and start from there.

My debian system does not have the same versions of the packages required according to the LFS book.
That's why I am interested in the livecd because it is a "known good host system" for building LFS.

My only option it seems, is to download the minimal livecd (No X) and download the required source tarballs by rationing out some bandwidth each month. I cant find enough relevant literature on this approach, that's why I am asking for some pointers from your experienced selves.

Well, you'll construct your own toolchain in the first few steps and compile everything else from then on using this new toolchain so that can be the supported version if you want it to be. I'm quite sure that the toolchain you have in your Debian right now will work just fine to make the LFS one so you shouldn't need to worry. It worked great on my Slack and should work on anything with a compiler from this millenium.

Thanks kumuliuninm,

I didnt know that, didn't give much thought to that either.
Since I am on Debian, I have been through dependency hell in the beginning,
and was worried because of that.

Just a recheck, the LFS book mentions 15-20 programs with "strict" requirements of certain versions. Shall I suppose that only the compiler matters and the rest is just to scare people like me?

No, you should suppose that all of them matter. If they didn't matter, they wouldn't be mentioned in the host system requirements.

The LiveCD is less than 1GB and comes with all the source tarballs you need to build the base LFS. The -min version is missing the tarballs in addition to X.

weibullguy might be correct and you should perhaps follow his advice but I'd just like to share that even though I'm not too knowledgeable about linux, I managed to build my own distro following LFS book quite loosely. I also got lots of help from DIY linux reference build. I installed the latest version of every package exept for the toolchain for which is used the known stable versions. There were a couple of small problems but nothing that some google searches couldn't fix. I was quite devoted on not making just another LFS build but my completely own distro and I'm happily writing this post from it. Erring on the side of caution has its benefits but so does customization. Finding the balance is up to you. I'd suggest to use known good versions of gcc, binutils and glibc (some combinations noted in DIY Linux RB 1.6 build notes section) and have fun with latest and greatest for everything else. Whatever you choose, you'll probably still learn lots of new stuff, best of luck.