I read somewhere that it was possible for a user to get minimum Slackware 10.0 installed/running on a Pentium 133 Machine with very little Ram.

Can one do the same with LFS ? I perhaps missed the minimum systems recquirements for LFS. Can someone tell me the min. syst. recquirements for LFS or give me the link in this regard please ?

Also, how does LFS differ from Slackware ? Is Slackware more like Gentoo ?

Thanks.

Vijay

Vijay - you have a stack of posts asking questions about LFS. LFS is a system you compile specifically for your hardware, this means that the system requirements are whatever you have. If you have an old, slow pc you would compile with less intensive apps (no KDE or Gnome, for example). If you have a newer system, you would compile and install for that system.

Slackware is like Gentoo in that it is very configurable, will run on older kit and is very popular.

Thanks very much for the response/clarification.

Initially, when I came on here over a year ago, the same happened. I asked quite a few questions, then took the plunge, learned/installed Linux. After that I remained mostly a lurker here for a long time but for occassional posts.

With LFS too I expect it to be the same way.

Vijay

Yeah, I've got Slack10 on a P100/32MB but X was such a hassle that I took it off. A minimal X is doable but just not worth it. So you could get LFS to do the same except you're faced with the need to cross-compile or spend a few years on the project. Compiling just a kernel on a P100 can take what may have been up to 8 hours. (I dunno - I fell asleep both times.) Plus, LFS requires a lot of build space which you may not have on a old box. I compiled those kernels with Core, which is a bare minimum prebuilt system which then requires a kernel compile and space was tight in 812MB. I didn't have room for kernel sources and compiling with Vector, for instance.

Regarding Slack, LFS, and Gentoo - LFS is a source-by-hand distro. Gentoo is a source-by-package-management distro. It's much more automatic and I found fine-grained control harder to exercise. Granted, I probably did not invest in learning the package system to the extent I should have but that's what I didn't like about it. Learning Gentoo may *help* with all things but it mostly applies to Gentoo. Building LFS or even compiling on top of Slack is a worthwhile investment because what you learn applies to the basic universal Linux build tools without a special layer on top. And Slackware is a binary distro that's just very compile-friendly. In a weird sense, it's kind of like Core in that way. You can slap on as minimal a system as you'd like and build as much as you'd like. Or kind of like Gentoo from a stage 2 or 3 or whatever (I built mine from the ground up, so forget what stage is what).

I don't really know what you want, so I can't say which is most suited, but those are some key differences. Core or Gentoo from a certain stage or a minimal Slack will give you a fast prebuilt binary base and Gentoo from another stage or LFS will give you a purely source-built system - one 'automatically' and one 'manually'. Compiling will take longer on an old box, but *any* of these systems should run. And probably none of them would run X all that well on a very old box.

Great post. Thanks for the helpful explanations. I want to try LFS for sure but just wanted to know basic info. about other related Distros. That is all.

Vijay

I see LFS as nothing more than an educational tool, be warned of that before you install it. If you want a system with all the speed benefits of LFS (but also most of the pain in configuring it) I recommend that you try Gentoo.

I am beginning to believe this. However, LFS is a great lerning experience. I read a part of the Gentoo manual for change today briefly. After reading LFS, Gentoo seems to be much easier. So once a user knows LFS, I feel that the Linux experience becomes a whole lot better.

Vijay

Yea an education in the fact that less is always more and being in controll is always better !

People who say things like this have never tried Gentoo.

It's all the good things about LFS with a brilliant (source-based) package manager

What are some of the advantages of upgrading packages ?

Other than security and extra features, there don't seem to be any.

Thanks.

Vijay

Not only does it make it easy to upgrade packages, it makes it easy to uninstall them and reinstall new ones, and the system keeps track of all the dependancies.

And aren't security and extra features important?

There is really no reason to cross-compile unless you are switching architectures completely, ie going from i386 to sparc and etc. I recently built an entire LFS 6.0 system for a Pentium II 300 by sharing the Pentium 300's hard drive via NFS, on my Pentium 4 2.53ghz system running Slackware 10. I used a Knoppix LiveCD to boot the Pentium 300 PC and setup the NFS share. There are a few hurdles such as not being able to install the bootloader remotely of course, but all in all it went well and beats the hell out of waiting for days/weeks for packages to compile. In the past I've also physically removed a hard drive, placed it in a faster PC, built the system on it and put it back without issue. You just have to be careful to not hose your host system.

Edit: Oops, I spoke too soon. The 300 and and 2.53ghz are both technically i686's...hehe. But anyway, still seems like alot less trouble to build for a different target than to spend days/weeks compiling.