I'm reading up on LFS as I'm looking for a fun weekend project to learn more about linux.

What is the best way to get started, using the LiveCD or installing a host distro and using that? I could see the latter being slightly confusing

Is there another way?

I'm running on Vista(soon win7) and doing all this via virtualbox. I have VM's setup with fresh installs of ubuntu and slackware.

As detailed as the documenation is, I can't find any debates as to the best way to start

Thanks

Your call.

Assuming you have space on your Vista hard drive, I'd probably encourage you to try a real install of at least one distro sooner or later. Either in a VM, or as a dual-boot.

But by all means: using any "LiveCD" (including, but not limited to, LFS's Live CD) is usually a great way to familiarize yourself with a distro.

Good luck ... and have fun!

Sincerely .. PSM

If you want a weekend project, use LiveCD. You can never fully predict problems that can arise because you missed the needed version set despite harsh warnings.. CD will help you use compatible versions of sources and tools.

I think VMware is not good for building a real distro , you need to intall a real os on your hard dish
I see that LFS is not a week-end relax, it require a lot of time and work, newbie is not suitable for this project, newbie here means the people who never leave their windows
In most case, Slackware is a good distro in order to be a host system
the live CD is good too, but it has some disadvantage, it is rather slow

I think that OP is not a newbie. Also, if you have studied the book and agree to use automated LFS, it doesn't take that long. My first post here was about succesful configuration of LFS - I had around three and a half years of Linux experience back then (from the first installed Linux on my computer). We know OP has longer Linux exposure already.

I guess VMWare will slow things down noticeably, but it doesn't seem to be a real showstopper. On the other hand, reads from CD become reads from HDD.. Maybe Qemu +kQemu is better because it emulates a more realistic video card. LiveCD works best, of course, when you have enough RAM so that caching reduces read load.

seem a dumb question, but since OP has given a good intro, so I just want to check if I should use i386 system and not x86_64 ? Or it does not matter ?
The reason is I use x86_64 much often than the test-run livecd install i386.

Thanks!

really depends on what you want, what your system can handle. for me I use i386 versions because my memory does not exceed the limitations of i386. I have found one thing that keeps me away from 64bit is the flash plug-in never installs for me.

Really its preference if you like to back and forth you can always run virtually with virtualbox.

that's my 2 cents for what its worth.

virtualbox ? how? Official LFS site does not seem to say anything about VM.

If possible, just highlight the key steps. I installed vmware 1.0* on
my CentOS5.2 x86_64 machine, so I may understand the key steps involved.
It is a shame that I haven't to touched VirtualBox before. Again thanks!

Do not use the LFS live cd, it is obsolete. Some people in this thread recommended it, but you can check the package versions yourself (the LFS book has a script that checks for the versions). You can use any other live cd, provided that it's up to date/easily updatable.

Making a LFS system in a VM is perfectly fine. You can later move the LFS partition(s) to your real system if you decide to finally adopt it, but that's another (more complicated) subject.

V.B. is probably the easiest on to use. It should be in the package repository for your os. If you decide to use it you will want to get the ose version. Linux journal did an article on setting it up. It is wizard based so it does most of the work.

If you go that route just post back and i will attempt to walk you through it. Check out linux journal also.

I'm using vBox and the live CD. If it's your first time building an LFS system I'd recommend that because you won't need to worry about missing packages/dependencies/etc. Once you've built one using the LiveCD and understand how the packages work together, what's required and how to resolve problems, then you can tackle it with your own distro as a base.

Just a note - Virtualbox and LiveCD is great if you want to keep using your existing system while you build. As alluded by others, the LiveCD is out of date. It's great for a host platform, but you should download the new versions of programs with the wget input file mentioned in the 6.5 book. Also, the book mentions getting the latest kernel in the 2.6.30 series which is not the version in the book, so pay attention to your filenames on the linux-2.6.30 sections if you use .9 instead of .2 (not that it should really matter in most cases unless you have an older version, but why confuse the issue?)

even though I very much tempted to start lsf building but I am extremely cautious since once I start something and I hit something I will not give up until I find the solution, good and bad habbit for me.

earlier on, I have tried the baby step number 1, i.e, create a separate
partition on the existing hard drive using gparted and ready to go but then hold back since I need to choose clfs since I am using 64-bit CentOS as a host. I really don't want to mess with clfs until I have built lfs once, but for that I need a 32-bit CentOS host.

I think it may be possible to install virtual box to build lfs but I haven't got time to do virtual box and I believe virtual box build should take longer time that a native build. Yet to google "virtual box lfs" for a step by step guidance.