My question is pretty simple. Do I have what it takes to build my own Linux distribution from scratch? I would like do this mainly for one reason: Learn. I would like to find out more about Linux and what makes it tick. I have been using Ubuntu for about 3 months. To be honest I do not know programming very well, such as I know the basics of BASH and a little C, but I do know my way around the terminal. I searched this on Google and I got a lot of hits on customizing a system then using REmasterSys to burn a .iso. I don't want to do this I want to do it the hard way, so that I learn more. Even if is a hard and long task, I don't really care, I just want to know if I am capable, or if it something to be left to expert programmers.

There's a distribution for that purpose: LFS

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I read through that, and it seems like a excellent site. I'm am going to try to do that. Now I have a stupid question. On there it says the LFS partition should be about 1.3GB. But it later mentions a "Root" partition that should be 10GB. I would like to make the system on a USB that I have that is 2GB so no permanent changes will happen if/when I screw something up. Is it possible for me to put it on my USB, or will I have to partition the HDD?

Hello Jetso,

I'm happy to read that you want to learn more about Linux. This may be a good startingpoint.

I'd suggest to go another way instead. How about Slackware? Slackware is an excellent distribution for learningpurposes and you'll have a very knowledgeable community here in the forum http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/

I'm sure using Slackware will teach you everything you'll need in order to build LFS, and the advantage of running Slackware is that you'll learn, how a Linuxdistribution really works.

Your questions:the toolchain will need about 1.3 GB, the space you'll need for the system depends on the amount of programs you're going to install.a Linuxsystem on an USB-drive will be very slow, I'd not recommend to do this. How much space do you have available on your harddrive? If you create two additional partitions, one for / 10 GB and another 5 GB for /home, you will have enough space to try everything out. And if you have to reinstall everything, you'll only have to format the / partition without changing anything on your /home partition.

Markus

I recommend either doing LFS or Gentoo.

Here are some basic Pros of each (each is a con of another):

Gentoo:
Quicker to install
Has a package manager (for installation and maintenance)
Larger community/helpful Wiki
They support processor-specific CFLAGS settings (up to a limit (for the most part, anything beyond -O2 (in terms of optimization) is unsupported))
You're not building everything by hand.

LFS:
You're actually building everything by hand.

With both of these, you are likely to run into an issue somewhere in the process, which must be solved with your knowledge of the command line.

I can't comment on Slackware, as I've never used it, but I recommend you think about how long you're willing to spend on it -- I started LFS, then got a fraction of the way done and gave up. I instead have moved to Gentoo, which I can build in a day or two, and maintain (you can't easily update core packages in LFS).

I hope this helps, and good luck on whatever you pick.

I recommend Gentoo for learning because of all the support and documentation it has. Make sure you force yourself to use the command line and modify your system with on the back end with the config files. Stay away from the GUI's/Desktop managers.

IMHO, you need a good bit of technical knowledge, but I don't want to discourage something potentially excellent The Dynebolic guy is a single soul (www.dynebolic.org), so knock yourself out.

That is certainly true, but I'll make a slightly different recommendation: Read the LFS documentation. It is really pretty good, you'll learn stuff and having read it you should be in a position to asses your own readiness. And, obviously, if you do go on to to do the full LFS thing, it will be time very well spent.

And another recommendation; don't make your own distro (well, not for anything other than personal learning) unless you can write down in a few simple sentences what the objectives are and how your distro has a different emphasis from all of the others out there. I'm not saying that making a distro is a bad thing to do, just that the rest of the world has little use for it unless it has a particular focus or set of capabilities that are different from what is already available, and there are really quite a lot already available.

Okay. Thats exactly what I want to do. I need some help with the partitions though. Please look at my attachment for my HDD layout. Now to make room for the LFS I would need to shrink sda3 then extend sda4 and put about a 10GB ext3 partition on it, then use it for all the LFS. I am not going to have a /home for storage.

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Hello,

how many Ram does your machine have? 3.7GB of swapspace seem quite much, I'd recommend 512MB Ram as a maximum. If you have 4GB of Ram, you'll need no swapspace at all.

I'd recommend to create at least 2 partitions for Linux, be aware, that 10GB is not as much. If you're compiling your own programs the system will need relatively big amounts of harddiskspace (temporarily). So I'd recommend 25GB for / and another 10GB for /home (and if you don't want to call it home, mount it as /usr/local/reserve or something). The time will come when you have to reformat the partition and need some space as storage for important data which you don't want to change.

Markus

I have 2GB of DDR2 Ram. So What I mentioned in the earlier post is What I should do to keep all of my data, but still have room for LFS?

How much space do you need for your Windows?

Markus

I think I'll ask here instead of creating a new thread since it pertains to LFS...

I'm preparing to build an LFS installation...why make my own distro? Simple. Support for SPARC is very small. Which leads to my question: Will the 2.6.3x kernel compile for sparc32 (sun4m)? If so, would my architecture argument be sparc-* or sparc32-*?

Hello winblowzxp,

I think this is a theme for a new thread, and that in the programming-forum http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/ there are people who may answer your question.

What you can do at least is to look into the kernel sources, there is a file and you'll find a directory "arch/sparc" with more information.read the documentation of gcc http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/

Markus

I had always wanted to learn LFS, maybe I should get to know it better once I get my desktop up and running again.

I probably would also recommend Arch as a more noob-friendly way to customize Linux instead of LFS as you don't have to build everything from source. However, if you want to build everything from source I'd say Gentoo is a much better choice since it allows you to see the inner workings of apps.

However, in my opinion the perfect source-based distro is LFS + JHBuild + a custom moduleset, as it would providethe ability to resolve dependencies that could otherwise cause problems when building apps from source.