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

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: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.

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: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: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: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 ;-)