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Linux From Scratch 5.0 Book Released
Mecha-A writes "Linux From Scratch 5.0 was released earlier this month, incorporating GRUB as a bootloader, GNU coreutils, GCC 3.3, and lots of other package upgrades among other improvements. If you haven't tried it, LFS is a procedural outline for building a Linux system from the ground up. For those who can't get enough customizability..."
I've always wanted to learn how Linux was written, FROM SCRATCH!
I hope there will be book about GNU/Linux from scratch soon.
(awaits the flame about old smelling men with beards, and so on)
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
About two weeks ago I decided to try and install Linux on my old K6-2 450mhz machine gathering dust in the basement.
A friend of mine gave me a few cd's that had something called 'Mandrake' on it.
He said "This is supposed to be the most user-friendly 'distro' out there. Give it a try."
So with trepidation about wiping out my beloved win98se install on the old machine, I jumped right in.
On firing up the install disk, the Man-drake installer asked me if I wanted to remove the win98se partition
that already existed. After pondering this for several minutes I though, 'what the hell, I can always
reinstall it!' So I let it fly.
After what seemed like 45 minutes of swapping cd's in-and-out of the drive, the man-drake (isn't that some sort of bird?)
installer ask me what I wanted to use this linux machine for. So many choices! games, office, mail server,
web server, about 2 dozen choices flooded my screen. This is madness! So after carefully considerating my options
I decided to choose them all! I would be a Linux power-user to end all linux power-users!
So after this decision was made I waited. And waited. And waited. During this I started to wonder. My Windows XP
Home intallation on my other Peecee didn't ask me thse kind of questions, and it easily has the all the abilities
that man-drake advertised to have. After all, I paid for WinXP Home. Sigh, I guess this it the price one pays
for being part of the linux elite.
Approximately 50 mintues later I get another prompt from the man-drake installer asking me what kind of GUI I wanted
to use, KDE or GNOME. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! I selected both and let it fly.
After only about 20 mintues this time it appeared the install was completed. The mandrake installer told me it
was going to reboot and then I would revel in Linux goodness. I waited with baited breath while the reboot
churned away, eagerly waiting the opportuntity to use the KDE/GNOME interface. Page after page of command line
stuff flew by my screen, seeming to get faster and faster as the time of my linux deliverance approached. Then,
the screen flashed black (kinda like those scenes from the movie Wargames). I gasped and was presented with
something like this:
bsh: blah/blah/blah/ ____
What the hell was this? Wasn't this man-drake linux supposed to be user friendly? Instead of the friendly
confines of a WinXP like GUI instead I was given an ugly DOS like prompt, which looked supiciously like
the TRS-80 system I first learned BASIC on in high school. Is this all the farther the great open-source
movement has progressed?
After serveral minutes of sobbing and knashing of teeth, I came to a decision. All the linux fags out there
were not going to defeat me! They were not going to cry "Bend over WinXP boy, you're going to take linux OUR
WAY and like it!".
I quickly found my old musty copy of 'Unix in a Nutshell' from my college days and got to work. In a few hours
I found out how to start the KDE GUI. This made life so much easier. After several days I was able to get the
machine's 14.4 internal modem working with man-drake and connected to the internet, using a browser called
Mozilla. Where oh where were the glorious pop-ups that appeared as I was surfing porn sites? Those bastards!
After several more days I was starting to feel somewhat comfortable. Using something called Gimp to manipulate
my growing collection of adult images was becoming a habit. And because I was ashamed to let my friends and
neighbors know I was using a gasp! free operating system like mandrake, I kept the pee-cee in the basement. Now
my girlfriend things the sounds emanating from below are me just woodworking or lifting weights. I guess linux has
freed me after all!
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
About a month ago, I tried out LFS 4.1 and was very happy with it. (Wish I had known LFS 5 was coming so soon. I might have waited) I'm new to Linux and it helped me get a handle on a lot of commands that I probably would not have learned for quite a while longer had I not tried it. I'm currently in the middle of using the BLFS (Beyond Linux from Scratch) to add in the necessary tools to use my LFS system as my main linux system.
For others new to linux, I would recommend it. All you need is:
- A spare partition
- An ordinary linux distro to start building the lfs system. (I hear you can build w/o it, but I didn't try that method, as it wasn't recommended)
- Lots of free time
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
It seems like it has been updated very regularly, too.
Kind of an odd troll. It's been my experience that Mandrake does a very good job of configuring XFree86 w/o intervention, especially on old hardware like that in a K6-2 system.
Well, right now as in I started almost 24 hours ago compiling stuff. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great idea; so great in fact that I'm building it on a P-III 500. Which is something I'd strongly recommend against if you're in any sort of a rush. Of course, GCC gets compiled 4 times i think (three when it's bootstrapped, and again when it's built using the new toolchain), glibc gets compiled and tested twice. Compiling doesn't take so long compared to testing it. Later on I'll be building Perl, X, KDE (at least the libraries), Gnome, OpenOffice. Yeah, I think that covers the really big packages. I fully expect this whole process to take every bit of 48 hours. Nothing like sleep between compiles. :-) This must be what it was like installing Linux 10 or 11 years ago.
http://www.gentoo.org
/obligatory
How to create your own distro from scratch.
Hell or how about how to make a bootable cdrom for installing your distro.
I've looked but no such luck. Maybe the google nazis can find something to help out!
just builds this and that on top of LFS. Try this for starters.
As to a bootable cdrom how about this?
Google nazis? is that a sequitur?
illegitimii non ingravare
I must say, I've installed LFS 4.0 and 4.1 on a few machines, and it's taught me a _lot_ about Linux. I wasn't totally ignorant before, but I now know a bit more about compilation flags, standard directory structures, etc. It is, of course, a long and sometimes painful install - which is why I highly recommend booting from Knoppix to do the installation, as you'll get lots of things to toy with while you're waiting for some of the longer things to compile. =) Of course, that which really sucks is the fact that I don't want to reinstall until 2.6 becomes stable, and I can run XFS on my box.. ;.; Oh well. Hopefully that won't be too far off.
On the major tips side of things, if you've never done LFS before, make sure you download and install ssh for scp and sftp or lynx/links before booting into it. LFS is bare to the point of having no www, ftp, or nfs utilities, which can be annoying. =p Anyways, for those brave few souls, good luck, and happy compiling!
This statement is false.
I created several bash scripts that automate the process for me. It works pretty good and was easy to do. Every time a new edition is released I just update my scripts and then reinstall. The think I like best about LFS is the system in the end is configured to your liking. It takes time but gets you a very customized system.
Come join us at the Southern California Linux Expo on November 22nd at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. The exhibitors include Real Networks, Novell, and Pogo Linux. Some of the speakers include Seth Nickell, Chris Dibona, Patrick Mochel and John Terpstra. Full and student tickets are still available for this event as well as free exhibition only passes using the FREE promotional code.
I've seen this all before... Oh yeah: that's what Slackware was about. You see, real hackers installed Linux the hard way, and SLACKERS used Slackware. You can slack off your installation... Red Hat was (as far as I can remember) based on Slackware, which left much to be desired back in the day.
Now we come full circle. May I interest you in trying FreeBSD 4.x? Have I mentioned the PORTS tree?
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...