hi,

I'm new to this forum and, for a beginning, I want to make a question to all of you linux-experienced users and distro-makers with LFS.

after having tested several linux distros like RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Slackware, Gentoo and KNOPPIX (many of them on LiveCD), i decided to give LFS a try, but I have encountered a serious problem (at least for me):

I followed all the instructions on the book for building the initial packages like binutils 2.14 and gcc 3.3.2 (i wanted to include the new version rather than the 3.3.1, just thought it could be more 'efficient' or at least newest) in Pass 1 build, but just after building the stage 1 gcc, I have to unpack the kernel 2.4.22 headers (and I gone for the 2.6.5 because I wanted the IDE complete support for CD and CD-RW units instead of SCSI emulation, for example), but I encounter a severe problem at the time of making the platform-specific include/asm symlink.

that's what I do until the problem appears:

(first, of course, I unpack the linux-2.6.5.tar.bz2 file)

make mrproper (as suggested by the book for not to rely on the source tree being clean after untarring)
make include/linux/version.h

and when I enter the next command (that's make symlinks) it just says there's no target rule for symlinks... what have I done bad? the book doesn't give me any piece of advice on this, maybe the LFS book is intended to be used with only linux 2.4.22 kernel? or is there a way to workaround the problem?

I would like you to give me an answer to this because without it I'm afraid I'm completely stuck.

Thanks in advance,
Julio

P.D. BTW, my 'host' linux system at the time of trying this is the KNOPPIX 3.2 LiveCD (that's a Debian/GNU testing/unstable version), regardless of the inherently slower compiling speed due to several CD accesses during compilation or just normal system operation... everything has a cost, after all

The symlinks problem is easy, just do it by hand, make a symbolic link to the asm folder for your architecture and call it asm. For me on a pentium that would be
cd include
ln -sf asm-i386 asm
The problem with using the 2.6 headers comes near the end of the book. You need to do serious things to get e2fsprogs and util-linux to build on the 2.6 headers. These packages deal with your hard disk. If they don't work perfectly you're putting your whole system at risk. Don't do it. Here be monsters!
Follow book 5 and you will build a stable system. You don't need to build a 2.4 kernel at the end. I build a 2.6. I install module-init-tools instead of modutils and I alter the bootscripts slightly to mount the sys filesystem

thanks, Andrew, for the answer, i'll note down the line you've posted for me regarding the symlink creation, and i'll test it later this evening.

and with the util-linux and e2fsprogs 'problem', well... i'll continue for now with the book and if i encounter problems, well... i'll try to deal with it. anyway, i'm not willing to let GRUB be installed on the MBR, i've been booting all the distros i've tried with a floppy, so i don't assume the risk of having my windows partition go directly to limbo

to be honest, my intention on this 'project' is to test if the distro works fine, and if that the case, i'll try later to re-create all the distro but adding some features like support for xfce4 (hope I don't get annoying messages like having to update gtk+ or pango, like I had to do on some previous distros I had installed), but... everything will come at the right time, i don't want to go too fast with this

so, as said before, thanks

Julio