Slashdot Mirror
Linux From Scratch 6.0 Released
Bubblehead writes "The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of
LFS 6.0. This major revision of the book includes a number of major
package upgrades, including GCC 3.4.x, Linux kernel 2.6.8.1, and the
Udev software package, allowing for dynamic creation of device nodes.
The text has also been vastly re-written for improved readability."
I guess there could be multiple possible reasons. For example, it's good for learning (some parts) of how does your system work, or it could be good for "power users", or as you mentioned, for embedded systems or you could be a professional and just know how to design a good system. I'm sure there are much more reasons why someone would use systems like LFS.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The reason for LFs's existance is for learning. People who are wanting to learn the internal workings of a linux system would be well served by this distro/book. Its an excellent way to see how every aspect of a linux system runs and is built. You build every stage of it, and its fun to boot.
Thats exactly what I did. I started with mandrake, I hated it, went back to windows. Then in 2002, I decided to give redhat a try. Still hated it, but not as much. Slowly I realized it wasn't the OS I hated. It was the blindness I had. I was just doing what google told me to do, no clue why I needed all this crap installed by defualt by every major linux distro, or what half of it did. I would just google for what I wanted to do and type in blindly what google told me to do. Finally I found gentoo. This helped me understand the config files slightly better, but still I installed by blindly typing in the install document with no clue what half of it was doing. Then I found LFS. After a horrible time trying to follow instructions and get it working, I now think I know 500% more about linux then I did before starting. I can sit down in front of my system and know exactly how to do 99% of what I want to do, and why I need to do somethings instead of just saying, you have to type this to do that.
I'd recomend any linux newbie do 2 things.
1) Get a nice newbie distro with lots of hand holding so you can have a stable system
2) On a spare box/partition work on LFS, this will improve your skills and help you learn why things work and how to do basic admin and configs.
I dont use LFS as a full time OS, I just recently removed it from my test machine to work on some new things. I use ubuntu as my full time OS. I like the debian way, and ubuntu just seems a little cleaner after install and just more polished in general.
Err, LFS is not a distro at all. In fact, it's almost exactly the opposite, but it's the first step in making your own distro.
If you build this distro yourself, how can it be updated?
I have an account at freshmeat.net, and when certain apps or libraries I selected come out with a new version, I automatically get an email.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman