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

Just in case...

[dyingtolive]

...I didn't want to see the girlfriend this weekend anyway.

Re:Just in case...

[bigredradio]

girlfriend

LOL .. Good one.

Re:Just in case...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you're stalking her doesn't make her your girlfriend.

Re:Just in case...

[FairAndHateful]

...I didn't want to see the girlfriend this weekend anyway.

Hmmm. you might be on to something. I'm trying to simultaneously break up with my girlfriend as well as learn more about system administration. Building a LFS box might help me learn to automate a process I'd rather not do manually.

I must be working too hard...

[mykepredko]

When I saw the headline, I thought that the article described how you could create a linux kernel using http://scratch.mit.edu/

Which would have been a hell of a neat trick.

myke

Re:I must be working too hard...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Well, scratch would appear to have support for a clock, and a NOR gate, so an x86 compatible scratch VM is only your sanity away...

Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[brunes69]

LFS is a great learning process that shows you exactly WHAT makes your Linux tick, and what packages depend on eachother. Anyone who uses Linux should do it at least once.

And really, it is not that difficult.. if you follow the guide it is very unlikely you will have problems. And on modern hardware the compile is very fast.

Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[MattBD]

I second this. A couple of years ago I built an LFS system - unfortunately I buggered up the GRUB install somehow and couldn't fix it, so I wound up overwriting it with Slackware instead. Next time I have a go at it, I'll probably use a desktop rather than a laptop perched on the bed - it was not nice being sat there waiting hours for stuff to compile!

Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[h2k1]

Ten years ago i was an enthusiast of lfs, and i even made a Makefile for automated build of lfs... It was an extremely fun thing to do, and opened my eyes and made me understand that Slackware was the only prebuild distro that anyone should ever need for home use.

Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[shawn(at)fsu]

Last time I tried LFS it I didn't have any VM software. I'm think I'm going to try it again this weekend.

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:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[Hatta]

Thank you for the remarkably informative post.

Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[Skapare]

Yeah, like school was a waste of time, too. I didn't want to learn all that stuff.

Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[msobkow]

I agree completely. I built an LFS system many years ago just to better understand the process a distribution goes through and to get a better grasp of the overall software components and build approaches used by Linux systems overall.

It was a highly educational experience, but I'll stick with Debian-based systems that use APT updates, thank you very much. While educational to roll your own installation, rolling your own updates is incredibly time consuming.

Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once

[tixxit]

Anyone who uses Linux should do it at least once.

Did it while I was in school. Glad I did it, but wouldn't do it again. Everything was great, but software got out of date quickly, and upgrading anything in the middle of the dependency tree or higher just required too much time and baby-sitting. Just took way too much time to maintain.

Re:bah plain old recipe

[Thud457]

I dare someone to try this without gcc compiler and gnu userland.

fuck off, RMS.

Re:Who cares?

[teslafreak]

Right. A bunch of the software in OS X, and a bunch of the libraries that software on it uses are made by the Linux/Unix crowd. You enjoy Angry Birds though, i'm sure that will be practical experience for a job at some point.

Re:bah plain old recipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Building the kernel with icc is trivially easy, it does not replace gnu userland however.

When I ran gentoo it was trivial to setup a whitelist of packages to use ICC on, instead of gcc.

eBook formats?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a PDF and an HTML version of their manual. With the advent of eBook readers like the Kindle, you think they'd release an eBook version. ePub is more open than Kindle's .mobi, but even an ePub version is easily convertible to .mobi.

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:eBook formats?

[tlhIngan]

There's a PDF and an HTML version of their manual. With the advent of eBook readers like the Kindle, you think they'd release an eBook version. ePub is more open than Kindle's .mobi, but even an ePub version is easily convertible to .mobi.

If only ePub used HTML... then we could write a trivial converter that took HTML pages and zipped them up and call it an ePub.

Oh wait, that's what ePubs are!

Though, ePub uses a restricted subset of HTML - but it does support stuff like CSS. Heck, i think the Kindle format is also the same - restricted HTML.

Re:eBook formats?

[JanneM]

It would be very welcome, and (cop-out alert) had I had the time I would gladly have taken it as an excuse to learn about ebook formats.

An ebook version would be great, simply because it's searchable. But then, you want to take advantage of the format to create a really good, interactive index, perhaps links to a glossary and to external pages for all the included applications and so on. Suddenly it's no longer a quick format conversion but a whole new document.

So yes, I understand why you're reluctant to take it on.

Dear Slashdot

[oldhack]

How about a button to collapse a comment thread? Stick a little toggle button to each displayed comment to collapse/expand it and its children comments.

It would make it easier to skip over off-topic pedantic comment threads (or whatever thread the reader prefer to disregard) that often run interminably long while burying more germane comments far down in the page.

Re:Dear Slashdot

[characterZer0]

What do you want differently than what clicking ont he subject does?

Form scratch?

[Anonymous Coward]

To build Linux from scratch you first have to ... Make universe

    Carl Sagan

Be a real Jedi, do CLFS instead

[snikulin]

... and do it in Cygwin targeting x686. I've done it :P

Re:bah plain old recipe

[DrXym]

In theory you should be able to build kernel with intel compiler.

You can build it with clang too. And if you wished the entire userland could be non-FSF as it is in Android. Android uses a BSD licenced C runtime called BIONIC. There are other C runtimes which I assume someone could port, as well as the likes of uClibc which is LGPL but isn't owned by the FSF and could be coupled with Busybox for a userland. Depends on what a person is trying to build of course.

no livecd

[X0563511]

The LiveCD is unmaintained and can't build 7.0 or newer.

Are there any other bootable environments that could build this, or is one supposed to run this from an installed host now?

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

[japp1egate]

As someone who is currently undergoing a LFS install into a VirtualBox VM, I can confirm that the use of a live environment (live-CD, or what-have you) works perfectly. I am currently building my LFS under the Linux Mint 11 x86 gnome CD. As for the build itself - wheeee!

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.

Re:Who cares?

[lsolano]

People that knows that servers exists, do care. Maybe people with dozens of servers would like to learn

If you think that *real work* can be done just with iPads and macbooks, you don't know what real work is.

I love my Mac, but I love my Debian servers too. There's a world out there beyond desktop computers, iTunes and Mail. And by the way, there are better browsers than Safari.

Re:Before the trolling begins...

[PwnzerDragoon]

Nice try, hairyfeet.