LFS 4.0 Released

Tekmage writes "For those of you who have never had the pleasure of rolling your own Linux install from scratch, take a moment to check out Version 4.0 of Linux From Scratch. Definitely for the techies amonst us, there is (IMHO) truly no better way out there to get down and dirty with the inner workings of our favorite OS." LFS organizes its documentation into "books"; 4.0's book is dated yesterday.

Comments

LFS is really good

[Ron885]

I have been using lfs for about two years. I cannot imagine going back to a normal distribution. LFS gives you so much freedom with the way YOU want to setup your system. If you are looking for just something to do, or if you dislike all the available distributions, try out LFS and you wont be sorry.

Re:LFS is really good

[JebusIsLord]

As a compromise, use gentoo linux. It still gives lots of control to the build and upgrades are a cinch.

Re:LFS is really good

[CrazyBrett]

Ok, here's an example. My linux system at home (functioning as development machine, router, and firewall) is LFS. I've got each package installed in its own subdirectory under /pkg, and I've got /bin /lib /include and /man full of symlinks to the corresponding files in those directories (this is so utils like gcc, man, and the shell can find things without having to go searching all over the disk).

Removing a package is trivial: just delete its directory and remove the symlinks. Upgrading a package is trivial too: install the new package into a new directory, update the symlinks, and remove the old dir. If an upgrade has some problems, I can roll back to a previous install by rolling back the symlinks (provided I haven't deleted the old installation yet). My next project is to create a program that can manage the symlinks automatically, to make it even easier. (Preemptively: yes, I know about "stow", no, it doesn't do what I want)

I don't know of any regular distribution that lets you do that :)

Gentoo?

[thing12]

Why not just use Gentoo? You get all of the benefits of a fully customized and compiled distribution when you want it. Yet it's completely automated for when you don't want to be bothered with every little package that goes into a fully functional system.

Re:Gentoo?

[Ron885]

gentoo is an alternative, but its not the same as doing it by hand... you just start it and it does it all by itself... with lfs you can compile everything the way you want to with the options you want and dont need to mess around with the config files of gentoo.

Re:Gentoo?

[jormurgandr]

gentoo also isnt production stable yet. I've been using it on my home PC for about 6 months now, and although I love the portage system, it isnt perfect yet. Quite frequently, I've had to go in and edit files by hand, without any docs from the install, and without network access (emerge world killed my NIC several times, and my IDE controller another). Hopefully in time it will become more mature.

Re:Gentoo?

[Billly Gates]

Have you ever used it?

Its really iso-linux with a few added features. Everything and I mean everything needs to be installed from scratch. No X, apache, sound, even network settings. You need to setup everything yourself. Very different from the current world of distro's. I suppose some of it is automated like "emerge kde" would install X and kde, but everthing else needs to be installed from scratch.

Re:Gentoo?

[Fiver-rah]

That's an unfair characterization. Sure, you get to compile your own kernel and set up a network and all that stuff. But installing new software is always as easy as typing "emerge ". Saying "everything else needs to be installed from scratch" is pretty unfair. There are scripts and ebuilds written so that pretty much all you do by hand is set up the file systems, handle networking, and compile the kernel. You don't need to worry about where to download things, or what to download, or which patches to apply or anything like that.

problems with GCC3.2 though

[jormurgandr]

I've been using the 4.0 release candidate for about 2 weeks now, and although it is AWSOME, it does have some problems with some packages, like GDB and Tripwire (neither will compile). I'm pretty sure the problems are related to GCC 3.2. Hopefully a patch for GCC will be released soon so as to compile these apps properly. Just a warning for those interested in LFS (its great otherwise).

Re:problems with GCC3.2 though

[ct.smith]

I wonder if the problems are really gcc3.2 and not the source code. I've just spent the last week trying to compile a suite of programs with 3.2 just to discover that none of it compiles. However, each problem was actually due to use of non-standard C++ code. The issue is that old versions of gcc let a lot of non-standard code compile, but the newest version is much more strict. I would hope that the solution is to fix the code and not make the compiler do silly things to remain backwards compatible.

I suspect that there is a large amount of code out there that has the same problem. Probably this includes the packages you couldn't compile.

Re:problems with GCC3.2 though

[Anonymous Coward]

There were problems with gdb and gcc-3.2, but
they have been fixed. gdb-5.2 works fine.

Re:Mirrors and /. effect

[iamthemoog]

For your enjoyment:

North America
Fremont, California, USA [8 Mbit] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml
Lufkin, Texas, USA [6 Mbit] http://linuxfromscratch.idge.net/lfs/intro.shtml
Columbus, Ohio, USA [1 Mbit] http://www.us.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml
Calgary, Alberta, Canada [10 Mbit] http://www.ca.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml

Europe
Mainz, Germany [100 Mbit] http://lfs.linux-provider.net/lfs/intro.shtml
Amsterdam, The Netherlands [100 Mbit] http://www.nl.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml
Oslo, Norway [100 Mbit] http://www.no.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml
Lancaster, UK [100 Mbit] http://linuxfromscratch.mirror.ac.uk/lfs/intro.sht ml
Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria [64 Mbit] http://www.at.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml
Karlskrona, Sweden [10 Mbit] http://www.se.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml
Freising, Germany [4 Mbit] http://www.de.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml
Teesside, UK [256 Kbit] http://www.linuxfromscratch.co.uk/lfs/intro.shtml
Odense, Denmark [256 Kbit] http://www.dk.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml

Australia
Brisbane, Australia [155 Mbit] http://www.au.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml

Asia
Singapore, Singapore [45 Mbit] http://www.sg.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/intro.shtml

Gentoo is a great iso-linux distro

[Billly Gates]

If you want a balance between installing everything from scratch and a real distro with documentation, then I would recommend Gentoo.

Gentoo is pretty much based on iso-linux from the linux from scratch project.

The benefits are great documentation from their website and the best package manager out today. It truly feels like an os you own and not by some corporation since you have to put the os together yourself. The forums are also great. If you want to get your hands dirty and have a huge community help you out through the process then look no further.

Re:Gentoo is a great iso-linux distro

[Junta]

Well, to be fair, while I *love* portage, I would say the ebuild system isn't the best package manager feature wise (portage would be the package distribution system, ebuild the package system). Ebuilds add optional dependencies, but that is it. But from the perspective of the portage system as a whole, there is a problem. The end system is highly optimized and installs truly are managed well, but if you are undecided about packages that may become dependencies for other packages, well, there is often no turning back while knowing for certain what will be impacted. On installs, portage intelligently figures out what is needed and what optional packages to use based on USE flags. But unmerging will just do that package without regard to broken dependencies. If you are unsure about what you want, gentoo may not be right.

Personally, I use gentoo on my laptop and desktop (and would my router if I didn't mind spending days for it to finish), but there are things about it that make it not best for everyone.

Re:Gentoo config files

[thing12]

The gentoo config files are not all that bad - they bring order to the chaos that is a source based distribution. With LFS you either remember what you have installed (which may be easy since you tend not to install very much when you have to do it from scratch) or most likely keep track if it in a file (or on paper). Either way you need to know what you have installed so you have that info available to pass as configure options. With gentoo you keep track of that in one place. Then for every package that *can* use, for example, OpenLDAP it will automatically be configured to use it. It's so much easier than LFS - and yet I'm failing to see what you lose with Gentoo...

LFS is great

[Repugnant_Shit]

Its been a great way for me to learn the ins and outs of Linux. I still don't know everything but I'm much more comfortable setting everything up. And the #LFS channel on irc.linuxfromscratch.org is very helpful.

As an aside, try using Slackware 8.1 for your base distro. Its got a pretty small footprint but it still has everything you need.

Why LFS indeed?

[ageitgey]

I'm sure people are going to reply saying that LFS is a niche product and not news that many people care about.

Well, though most of you are probably exposed to Linux through the desktop, Linux is winning it's in-roads in the industry through embedded systems and handheld devices (not desktop). Functional LFS installs can be as little as 5 megs or so and completely customized. Perfect to compete with several-thousand-dollar offerings from MS, Palm, etc.

So if embedded systems are driving commercial linux support, in a way LFS and systems like it are more important in the short term than Mandrake and SuSE.

So why not write your local LFS contributer and say thanks?

Re:Why LFS indeed?

[HIghoS]

Hrm... Actually getting a system running in 5-8MB is quite modest today. At the time (2y ago) Gerard had build a complete lfs system and stripped all the useless packages/files from the system and then installed apache. It actually worked quite well for it's purpose.

Today, it could be done in under 1MB by switching to uClibc from Glibc and so forth.

Honestly however.. just do some research. I know of dozens of people that have done this over the years, many of them have posted details on weblogs, mailing lists, portals, etc. It's such a grey area and considered more "embedded" then custom that there isn't much of a need for documentation like the lfs-book.

It's just assumed that if you are going to be working on such a project-you at least know where to start :)

*shrugs*

Re:This is only slightly off-topic but,

[Ron885]

the reason LFS doesn't come with cron is because it is not an ESSENTIAL program to the operation of a linux system. you may want/need it, but someone else might not. it isn't essential so its not included, plus there are hints that provide information on how to compile it. that is what is so great about lfs, anyone in the community can contribute by writing a hint.

Re:This is only slightly off-topic but,

[Johan Veenstra]

A text webbrowser, a ftpclient, telnet etc is also pretty basic, but don't expect to find it in LFS. LFS is sorta just enough to build another LFS from.

If you want that cron/ftp/telnet/lynx/cdrecord/lame/xfree/kde/gnome etc etc stuff, check out Beyond Linux From Scratch:

http://beyond.linuxfromscratch.org/

Johan Veenstra

Re:Mirrors and /. effect

[HIghoS]

Yes, we have been slashdotted several times now. It's one of the reasons we have always kept the mirror list on the front page. We are also the main host for http://www.distrowatch.com so we have to keep up with all the barrage of hits it gets also :)

It's always fun *coughs* to watch how shadowfax (the lfs server) handles the load. A little while ago we had nearly ~100 apache processes spawned with a load of almost 5.00. It's gotten a little more sane wotn to about ~50 proc/0.50 load.

The best part is problably looking at this; http://stats.linuxfromscratch.org/mrtg/

Re:Too many todo's

[HIghoS]

Hey fear not. Getting KDE running on an LFS system is not *that* hard.

There's a subproject of LFS, that isn't as well known as it should be, that's documenting the process of installing software after (or I should say 'beyond' :) the completion of the lfs-book.

http://beyond.linuxfromscratch.org/view/cvs/

In there, you will find all the information required to install the graphic libraries, X11, KDE, and so forth.

You can also check out the lfs-hints for additional software/issues that are not covered by the blfs-book;

http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints.shtml

It's more about taking the time todo it ;-)

Re:LFS as the basis for a distro

[dogas]

Knoppix essentially does what you're saying.

It's a distro that doesn't use the hard drive at all. It boots from a cd, detects your hardware, and loads up KDE3. It's does a pretty good job at hardware detection, although saving your settings (and files) for the next time is kind of a pain. However, for trying Linux out without screwing up your machine, Knoppix does a pretty good job.

Re:educational value

[CoolVibe]

Also symlinks do have a very small effect in speed and usually take up 4k per symlink depending on your choice of file system.

This "problem" has a simple solution. If the slack from symlinks bothers you that much, why not move to a extent-based filesystem like XFS? I use it on most my LFS and Gentoo boxes, and it works like a charm.

Re:Gentoo on a modem (was Re:Gentoo?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Installing from source does not require a broadband connection. lfs, lunar, sorcerer--all source-based distros that don't require lots of bandwidth. And neither does a portege system require lots of bandwidth. Consider Debian or *BSD. So what is it that distinguishes Gentoo again?

Re:educational value

[Simon Kongshoj]

The GNU tool you're referring to is probably Stow.

Other good package management tools for LFS use include Depot, Graft, swpkg, opt_depot and the countless other free package managers whose names I have forgotten.

Re:This is only slightly off-topic but,

[HIghoS]

You obviously didn't take the time to look at any of the recent books then. ReiserFS support was removed a nunber of months ago (from the lfs-book) and moved into the blfs-book.

There is now a dedicated section, not just for ReiserFS but any other FS we eventually want to include and support;

http://beyond.linuxfromscratch.org/view/cvs/post lf s/filesystems.html