Well it all depends like you said, on what you wanna do. There's no real template of options outside of the real basics. It takes a couple times to really see what's up and get what you want. Trial and error, I can't count how many times i've had to recompile. Uggg..

HELP!!!!!

Hi guys

I have a few problems.

I cant mount my floppy

My IDE chipset wont enable DMA

And I cant load my network card

I,ve tried the fstab suggestions, and also the fstab settings from my Mandrake setup, but nothing works? If I put msdos in the fstab, my PC continuously attempts to access the floppy and wont accept input from the keyboard anymore? and if I try auto it then echo,s .. you must specify the filesystem type?

I,ve tried mount -t msdos fd0 /mnt/floppy

but it then says msdos isnt compiled in the kernel, when I know it is. because I found it and installed it.

My IDE chipset states that DMA isnt enable in the bios, but it is? and works fine in Mandrake? I,ve also chosen what I think is the correct IDE in the kernel because its the only ALI option in there.

I also created the modules.conf and placed a line in it that reads...

alias eth0 8139too but that doesnt work either?

Now i,m wondering if i,m compiling correctly?

what commands must I run before attempting a new compile?

make clean
make menuconfig

or am I missing something?

Thx guys

RecoilUK

Recompiling is a good idear and it's better to add a few things than miss some and get problems. I can't honestly remember where everything is in the menuconfig at the moment, but when you recompile, instead of doing a make clean, do make mrproper.
That will do a "real" cleaning, and won't leave things lying around like make clean. If you have saved your config as something, it won't delete it. I just name mine one two three.config and always have an ongoing set of configs to look back at. Just save the config in the main dir, no need to type a path just whatever.config As I can recall now, make sure in ATA/IDE menu that the "use PCI DMA when available" is checked. I could actually email you my first config, it's very generic and you can see what's what even though you may have to change a couple things for your system. Lemme know.

First timed compile on my 1G T-Bird 512M RAM in LFS:

Make dep = Total 59s
Make bzImage = 3m33s

Decent enough, but it's no 127s But you have 200Mghz on me finegan.

Hi again

You know the messages that Linux puts on the screen when booting, especially about the hardware at the beginning, what file is this written? anybody know?

Because noW I need to compare the messages against my Mandrake box, as I have now got udma working because I used the old config file from Mandy 2.4.8 and compiled with that, taking out stuff I definately didnt need, no its gonna be trial and error until i get my kernel small enough but with the same effect.

Thx guys

RecoilUK

All of the scripts that you and I decided not to type, those are the boot/init scripts that run everything and are in /etc/init.d I don't know why LFS did it this way but they sort of doubled up by adding all those runtime dirs rc.0 rc.1 etc...All that is in them are symlinks to the appropriate init.d scripts. That's something i've been thinking about changing and making it a little more like Slack. But that's where you'll find the inits to edit to your boot liking. Trial 'n error is the only real way to get things right for your system. Good job on all the hard work so far. It don't end.

Taz, dude that's SysV init that I've been going off about for so long. Man, you really did take up slack and never looked back!

There's some tips for building (and samples I think), for init scripts that are BSD/Slack oriented that are pointed to on the LFS page somewhere in the chapter on the init stuff...

Recoil:

dmesg | more

or, to make a file

dmesg > kernelblurb

The file where dmesg lives is in /var/log/ and gets re-written every time you boot... I can't remember what it is offhand, and it varies per system and I'm 20 minutes from home right now... where my LFS is, er yeah, did that sound lazy enough?

That will include everything up to when init takes over, which should always be almost entirely on your screen anyway.

Cheers,

Finegan

Oh, taz, one more:

AMD Duron 1.0Ghz (yeah, the new Morgan core baby!), running Slack 8 and the 2.4.5, 256 PC-2100 DDR, crap HD so a lot of chaching, slim config, always 2.4.16: 3 minutes, 53 Seconds.

OK guys I give up.

Why oh why is Linux so difficult to learn? I dont have the knowledge I need to complete this project.

I just spend forever going from how-to to faq to guide to NHF and none of them can give me what I want - instructions on how to complete usefull stuff.

Or am I looking in the wrong places? All I want is to learn the really usefull commands that everybody must know, like how do I ls a screen at a time? its not in ls --help or if it is, its gone off the screen so I cant read it.

I tried to install XFree86 but that dont work, I configured ok, and then changed some lines to match my present X config, but none off the commands work? startx for instance, it works if I type

/usr/X11R6/bin/startx

and when that starts it complains it cant find xauth which I know is in

/usr/X11R6/bin

I even created a symlink from /usr/bin to the dir above, like Mandy has but it still dont work????? Am I missing something guys???

RecoilUK

Yeah, I really did run away on Slack! LOL I knew it was the SysV init style but it just doesn't seem logical to me. Oh well...hehe! I'll take a look around about those bsd/slack scripts on LFS or wherever they point. I just can't stand SysV I spose.

Nice time on the Duron. I had a 750 before this Athlon but it wasn't one of the newer ones obviously. It was still bu**loads faster than my old P200 with 64Megs. =)

No no, don't give up! This is where you get all the knowledge from. Noone said it'll be perfect right off, I am still having to tinker. Just go from small to large, X is quite the project right off the bat. Start littler...Get things polished up first and working the way you want before you go for projects. That way you'll know what's what. I read someone say once that they kept a log of everything they did so they knew where to go and what to look at. Not a bad idear I think. As far as the ls command try ls |more.
The | more option works with pretty much everything. If you want to see ALL info, type man ls or info ls. Just take breaks and relax and do what you can for the time being.

NEWS FLASH! NEWS FLASH!

Floppy is working
X is working at all resolutions lmao

I allready posted this question in the install forum but as I,m here I,ll ask you guys.

I thought the kernel automatically loaded modules? thats what the problem was I had to insmod r128.o and it worked, allthough not from the command startx but from XFree86?

Thats probably whats wrong my my eth0 to, i,ll insmod 8139too tomorrow.

How do I get these to install when needed or on boot?

Thx guys

p.s. I,m going to bed, Knackered been reading how-to,s all day

RecoilUK

Oh btw

On mandy make bzImage takes nearly 10mins

On LFS it takes around 7m 49s

and its 749kb, that sound to big to you guys?

Now i,m going to bed lol

RecoilUK

Congratulations Recoil!
I knew you'd persevere! Yeah, the modules need to load at bootup with a modules.conf file or something of the like, e.g. Slack uses it's own rc.modules. Most I think us an /etc/modules.conf though. i haven't played with my mods yet outside of doing a commandline load to see about sound and mouse etc....

749k is a pretty lean kernel. Mine's 888k which is a little larger than I want, but i'm not done polishing yet. But neither are considered "big". The after install kernel of Sack is 1Meg. Keep up the good work...I'm burning out a little but will get there soon.

V 3.1 book says "Before starting to install glibc, you must cd into the glibc-2.2.4 directory and unpack glibc-linuxthreads inside the glibc-2.2.4 directory, not in /usr/src as you normally would do.
"
Is this a directory that should have been created earlier in the process, or do I go to the /usr/share/doc/glibc-2.2.4 directory where my systems' glibc file is located and extract it there and run?
BTW, I'm compiling all this on RedHat 7.2....all seems OK so far, just don't want to botch it up now. Great thread, btw....all the pointers have helped me get this far along.

Hi

Yeah just cd into the glibc dir that was created when you unzipped it, and run the unzip command for the threads in there.

L8rs
RecoilUK