Beyond Linux From Scratch 1.0 Released

An anonymous reader writes "DistroWatch reports about the 1.0 release of Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS), a subproject of Linux From Scratch: 'The BLFS Development team is proud to announce the release of BLFS 1.0. With this release, you can take your LFS 4.1 base beyond a development system. It can be a desktop, a firewall, a multimedia player/editor, an Apache web server or all of the above. You install only what you need. Your Distro. Your Rules. Enjoy.'" Choose the closest mirror...

Comments

How different from Gentoo?

[mattbee]

I've recently been impressed by Gentoo Linux which lets you build your system from a BSD-style ports system: the whole thing held together by a bunch of Python scripts, but otherwise your build options, tools and so on are your own choice. If that's not Linux From Scratch I'm not sure what is :-)

Having said that, I'm not always convinced that the way to a reliable server setup is to build everything yourself, but both LFS and Gentoo look good for the desktop.

Re:How different from Gentoo?

[kinnell]

The difference is that with gentoo, you don't learn much because most things are automated. Yes, gentoo is probably a much better option for someone who just wants a customised linux distribution. LFS, though, is an outstanding educational tool, for one thing, and an invaluable resource if you want to produce a linux distribution which is radically different from the norm in any way.

If you want to learn about how and why a linux distribution is put together, LFS is the way.

Re:How different from Gentoo?

[Rasta Prefect]

Linux from Scratch is actually quite a bit different from Gentoo. Gentoo provides you with executable code, you answer some questions and you have a new install, although the process takes longer and is more configurable than say, downloading pre-built packages. Linux from Scratch, last time I checked, provides you with a document. Thats it. No packages. First you create and format your partitions (by hand, using fdsck and mkfs). Then you create your filesystem, (mkdir /usr /var /etc.....), then compile statically linked versions of them minimum utilities needed to boot and compile, then reboot, recompile libraries and dynamically linked versions, then start compiling the rest of your system software. All by hand. And you have to create your own init scripts (although examples are provided).

Why would you want to do this? It's an excellent way to learn about Linux. You learn exactly what components make up your system, get a pretty good idea how they interact, etc.

Would you want to run this on a system you actually use? Probably not. It's a pain in the ass. Everything has to be compiled from scratch. No package system to minimize cruft build-up. Every security patch has to be downloaded and applied by hand. It's very time consuming.

Re:How different from Gentoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in other words, you only use this if you want to claim to be l33ter than thou...anyone with an actual life uses Gentoo.

People with actual lives use Mandrake or Red Hat. People with l33t tendancies but an aversion to work use Gentoo. People who want to learn stuff use LFS.

Re:How different from Gentoo?

[jdavidb]

Gentoo Linux is a distro. LFS is a "Make your own distro" HOWTO.

Suppose there were no Gentoo, and you wanted to make your own distro with the design goals of Gentoo. You'd install some other distro like RedHat or Debian (or perhaps even a completely different OS; anyone ever bootstrap Linux from FreeDOS?) and slowly compile your own packages. You might choose to use rpm, dpkg, your own, or no packaging system. You'd have a bit of dependency hell while trying to figure out what order to compile everything in (and make sure that you didn't wind up with library dependencies on the original distro). Finally, you'd want to repeat the process from within your new distro; after all, you want it to be self-hosting rather than having to install RedHat each time you build a new version.

Mastering LFS trains you to do all this. Does everyone need to know how to do this? No. Do we really need any new distros? Probably not. But people who have said, "Yes we do" have often brought us much better systems (like your beloved Gentoo). Plus, I found learning this material to be intensely interesting and right up my alley.

Re:I think I'm missing something

[kinnell]

Yes it does. It's right there in the documentation

Where exactly? In chapter 9 (hint: this is the last chapter in the book), "What now" it states:

Now that you have finished installing your LFS system, you may be wondering "What now?". In order to answer that question, we have composed a list of resources for you.

Beyond Linux From Scratch
The Beyond Linux From Scratch book covers installation procedures for a wide range of software beyond the scope of the LFS Book. The BLFS project can be found at http://beyond.linuxfromscratch.org/.

...From which I conclude that you are a troll, and the person who modded you "insightful" is an idiot.

Can we please shift PRIORITIES?!

[ajs]

Instead of inventing YET ANOTHER WEB SERVER DISTRO (yes, I've been tempted too), can we please focus our efforts on the things that are wrong, broken and unusuable in EVERY DISTRO ON THE PLANET?

Here are some suggestions for your distro-crafting efforts (no implied priorities):

• There should be a way to say "fetch documentation for x" where x is a path name to any non-user file (and a few user files). man is the "right place" to do this, although if you wanted to take the time to re-engineer info so that it could take any program name or path name as an argument and find the right documentation AND had an initial dir.info that wasn't so geard toward "so you've installed EMACS and the GNU tools on an existing UNIX" then it might be a useable replacement for man (and info has the benefit of being a bit easier to convert into other forms like GUI-viewer, print and HTML-based representations because it's based on a more generalized markup language (texi) which is in turn based on a more powerful typesetter (\TeX). I'm a long time (15ish years) user of UNIX and UNIX-like systems, and I still want this!
• A set of management tools for pam that runs the spectrum from adding a user to choosing a password hashing format to setting up an LDAP server based on an existing source (local files, an external database, etc). In the UNIX tradition (and for good and valid reasons that you can find by searching USENET, and I won't go into here) it should be command-line driven, but I would not complain at all about a GUI tool
• A heirarchical installation model that allows for a /usr, /opt and /usr/local which are applied to all system paths and configurations in reverse order (e.g. default paths all start with /usr/local/bin) and which package maintainers have well defined conventions for using according to historical precident (/usr is for distribution-native packages, /opt is for third-party packages and /usr/local is for site-local items that are created and installed by the maintainer of the system). If I put GNOME3.0pre-alpha97 into my /etc/apt/sources or whatever the equivalent is, and install it, it should go into /opt so that un-installing it puts my system back where it started. If I hack my own copy of Perl and install it, it should go into /usr/local so that it's clear that this is my hacked version and not something installed from the official distribution.
• sudo, ssh, and pam all have different views on what it means to authenticate. These views need to be merged at the distribution level into a single means of authenticating. This is a hairy problem, and may involve feeding back into all three projects, but if I don't have a password because I use a pam-based smart card and ssh-agent for remote key exchange then I can't use sudo (which requires a password). sudo is well within its rights to require periodic re-authentication, but that needs a mechansism (through support in it and the infrastructure of the os including pam and ssh) to feed that re-authentication request all the way back to my smart-card interface....

So, if distributions are seeking to solve problems like these, great. If they're not, and they're just another way to customize Red Hat or Debian or install from source or put your files on an FTP server, then I have to ask if the authors of these tools are even scratching their own itch?!