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How to Build Your Own Linux Distribution
Shelly writes "Go to the source to learn Linux basics and build the right Linux for you. Linux From Scratch (LFS) and its descendants represent a new way to teach users how the Linux operating systems work. LFS is based on the assumption that compiling a complete operating system piece by piece not only teaches how the operating system works but also allows an independent operator to build systems for speed, footprint, or security."
With LFS reaching 6.0 a while ago, how is this news exactly?
LFS is a nice way to learn more about Linux, I built LFS on a box a few years ago, and probably learned more about Linux doing so than I ever could have just from using it, or just from reading books targed at a specific distribution.
That said though, I don't think it's very practicle for a system that you actually want to use for day to day use. Building a Linux system from scratch takes a lot of time, and then you have to keep track of all of the security patches for all of the packages you used, and if you want to upgrade one of the core libraries for some reason you end up having to rebuild most of the system.
Building a distro for scratch is a fun way to learn, and I encourage hobbiests who are interested in learning how a linux system works to do so, but unless you have a critical mass of people contributing patches, helping with stuff, etc, then you end up spending all your time keeping the distro up to date, and no time actually using the system.
Which, if your just in it for the hobbiest aspect isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I still think it's generally impracticle if you want to have an actually usuable distribution.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Re-visiting the LFS scenario every year or two, for you distro-monkeys, should be a requirement of the "Order of The Penguin" membership ...
I don't understand this "Cult of the Difficult" that seems to be very pervasive in the Open Source community. Software has always been about making the difficult easier. We design and write software to make tasks faster or more easily performed or, in some cases like the spreadsheet, possible.
So I don't see what the fascination is with trifling with the minutia of a system just for kicks. I guess if it's for your own kicks, that's fine, but comments like yours above are very common in the computer technology industry. "If you don't understand the root of this, you will never understand this."
Understanding every little bit of something is not a requirement for using it. For most things, it shouldn't be. And for the best-written software, it isn't. Why, then, do people think that getting your hands dirty in Linux source code is such a good thing for everyone? It seems like a colossal waste of time for most people who would rather get their work done.
I had the same reaction when some Mac fanatic tried to tell me how much more user-friendly MacOS was in one breath and then turn around and tell someone that they need to manually increase the amount of RAM allotted to some random program in the next breath. That isn't user-friendliness. That's OS-retardation.
A good piece of software should anticipate what you want to do and make it easy to do it. It should handle things that you don't want to handle, and it should optimize things that you do often. It should, to steal a phrase from Apple, Just Work.
I don't want to fiddle with Linux's innards any more than I want to fiddle with my own. I am happy with GIGO and am willing to accept it as a black box, but if something goes wrong, I'd rather call a doctor who spent 8 years of their life studying the black box than trying to do that studying on my own.
We probably don't need any more general purpose distributions, but the value in a kit for making a new distribution is for specialised applications. There are various router/firewall projects and a couple of DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) packages that come in to this category, for example. There's lots of potential for whole applications that boot from a CDROM like Knoppix and can be temporarily used on an PC without touching what was installed on the HD.
I love Gentoo myself but I don't know how much it really teaches you about how Linux works. Most of the nitty gritty parts about installing packages is hidden by the Portage system. The only difference between typing in "emerge kde" vs. "apt-get install kde" is that it takes alot longer and you see a ton of compilation messages. The directory layout is chosen for you, the dependencies are installed automatically for you, etc. How much do you really learn watching hundreds of pages of GCC messages whizzing by?
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999