Linux From Scratch 7.1 Published

Thinkcloud writes "The Linux From Scratch (LFS) project has published version 7.1 of its manual for building a custom Linux installation. The new release of the step-by-step instructions is 345 pages long and uses more up-to-date components than previous versions – for example, the 3.2.6 Linux kernel and version 4.6.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The update also includes fixes to bootscripts and corrections to the text, as well as updates to 20 packages."

Comments

Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[bjoast]

I actually built my first LFS system on a netbook with an Intel Atom processor... It took a few days, but it was definitely worth it. You learn a lot.

Re:eBook formats?

[Anonymous Coward]

We use the Docbook XML schema to markup the text of the book. There is support in the Docbook XSL stylesheets for producing ePub output and I tried it once (despite it requiring Ruby which I have no other use for), but the output wasn't particularly good looking. It probably just requires some tweaking to the stock stylesheets, but I didn't have the time to look into it any further than that. I know it's a cop-out, but patches welcome :-)

Matt Burgess (LFS editor + part-time release manager)

Re:no livecd

[dkleinsc]

LFS can typically be built from any Linux host system - a Knoppix CD or a liveCD for any other distro would probably work.

Or you could just check the host requirements.

Re:no livecd

[dkleinsc]

You're coming as close as you can to building Linux on a bare machine without manually inputing machine code - the purpose of the host machine is to give you things like:
  * a running kernel
  * a shell
  * a C compiler
  * a linker
  * The standard C libraries
  * Some very basic text processing tools, like awk and sed
  * A way to download the source code
  * A way to set up a file system on the disk
IIRC, Linus Torvalds used an existing Unix for most of this when he was first writing Linux.

The first steps involve setting up a completely empty partition, then compiling the C library (glibc), linker (binutils), C compiler (gcc), a shell (bash), and a few other tools. Then you chroot onto the partition you just set up and work in your chroot jail, with the only dependency on the original distro being the running kernel. Once you get to the point of having a bootable system, you leave the original distro completely behind.