FreeBSD From Scratch

geekmedia writes "Daemon News has an excellent article which describes a fully automated installation of a customized FreeBSD system compiled from source, including compilation of all your favorite ports and configured to match your idea of the perfect system. If you think make world is a wonderful concept, FreeBSD From Scratch extends it to make universe."

Comments

Re:I Don't Get It

[farnsworth]

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with binary distributions? What's with the recent rise in all these source based, do it from source distributions?

Most of the applications I use are written in a way that they are source-code compatible with almost all OSs. Almost none of them are binary-compatible on different OSs/libs.

Sure, I could probably run a compiled-for-red-hat-7.1 binary, but why would I, when I can emerge (or whatever) it?

Compiling from scratch is simply easier if you have a semi-modern cpu with the cycles to spare.

Re:Why?

[nathanh]

Would you use BSD over something better like Linux? Is it just to be different or something?

For some people, unfortunately, yes. There are some rare individuals who say "I use FreeBSD instead of Linux therefore I am better than you". These same people would have at one point said "I use Linux instead of Windows therefore I am better than you". These people can be safely ignored.

Re:I Don't Get It

[GimmeFuel]

It's not just the GCC optimization flags, it's total customization. Gentoo (my distro of choice and the most popular source-based Linux distro) also has USE flags, which allow you to compile programs with or without support for various things. If some app supports both KDE and Gnome, normally support for both would be compiled in, even though most users would only use one or the other. In Gentoo you have USE flags for KDE and Gnome, as well as a myriad of others. If you don't want KDE support compiled into apps, stick -kde in USE. Likewise with -gnome. Or put both in if you only use a more minimalist WM. Or -X if you're putting together a headless server, etc etc.

Some things from experience

[Sevn]

I found the article of little use at all for a few
reasons:

I think I've had an installworld fail ONCE in 7
years, and I think it was because I hadn't noticed
that the make buildworld failed.

As far as cruft in the OS laying around, I had a
system that went from 2.2.8 to 4.0 stable with no
problems. Part of the love of freebsd is not having to wipe partitions.

To sum things up, most of the people I know that
have had weird problems with things laying around
don't do two very important things:

#1 Run mergemaster

#2 Read /usr/src/UPDATING

As far as I'm concerned, the article this story
references is completely pointless. :)