
Major Proposed Changes to Linux From Scratch - InitEnabler
http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/2020-June/073815.html
======
freedomben
If you're not ready for the LFS plunge, install and configure an Arch Linux
system with a graphical desktop environment. I learned more about Linux in
that 8 (non-consecutive) hours than I had in the couple of years preceding.

Then study for the RHCSA and RHCE v7 (v8 is all Ansible now). Arch Linux and
RHCSA and RHCE taught me a ton about Linux and made me super comfortable with
my Linux desktops and servers.

~~~
R0b0t1
[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/install-
gentoo](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/install-gentoo)

Goes even deeper than arch. The desktop profiles make it almost set-and-forget
now.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I'd say Arch, then Gentoo, then LFS. Arch provide you with usable binary
packages and leaves you to know what to install and how to configure it.
Gentoo makes you actually build those packages from source and gives you more
control over how the process works. Then LFS takes away even what portage was
doing for you and makes you do the build process yourself by hand from
scratch.

~~~
znpy
It's kinda sad that no one recommends Slackware Linux anymore.

Back in the day there we used to say: "when you know slackware you know Linux.
When you know red hat all you know is red hat".

Effectively when I got into slackware my computer wasn't 100% working all of
the time but I learned a lot. I then moved on and years later I got rhcsa
certified and that's very worth it too.

Not sure about arch, I never really used that, but I can vouch for slackware,
Gentoo and the RedHat/centos/rhcsa thing.

~~~
kdtsh
Absolutely.

If you’re looking to just learn about Linux, you can’t go much further than
Slackware. It’s as Linux as you can get: you can learn distros (which
admittedly is easier now that many are built on a few different platforms -
GNOME, xfce, systemd, etc.), but Slackware gives you a kernel, core-utils, and
a bunch of packages - can’t get much simpler than that.

Also once you track -current and get around SlackBuilds you can install almost
anything you want, it’s a full-fledged and modern distro. Without dependency
management to be sure, but if you’ve got a well-made distro and you compile
most of the software you install, who needs it?

------
darren0
I can't recommend Linux From Scratch enough. If you want to understand the
composition of the Linux user space, this is one of the best exercises to
follow.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
i feel like linux from scratch is kind of overkill

1\. format a disk a bootable active partition with ext4

1\. download the kernel, make defconfig && make

1\. copy the kernel to the partition with syslinux mbr.bin and probably
extlinux.conf (probably copy modules too)

1\. copy busybox over

1\. voila

~~~
Jaruzel
Is this documented properly somewhere, so that I can give it a go?

I've tried and failed with LFS so many times, I can't count - I tend to just
run out of time, and by the time i go back to it, I've totally lost where in
the process I was.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
I don't like giving my real name out online but I have a GitHub repo that does
this _automatically_ as a CI/CD job and a single shell script. It's really
neat. Reach out to me (my username @ gmail.com) and I'll share it with you/

------
vbsteven
This brings me back to my years of running Gentoo as my daily driver. All fun
and games until you update your system over the weekend and spend the rest of
the weekend fixing broken networking. But it is all worth it if your goal is
learning the ins and outs of an OS and how it all fits together.

It was fun booting to a graphical desktop in a few seconds, opening activity
monitor and seeing < 70mb memory used. This was with XFCE around 2010. Now it
is 2020 and Task Manager on my daily Windows 10 machine shows 27gb memory
used.

~~~
justaj
Every time I read comments about Gentoo it's either about systems unexpectedly
getting broken after an update, which supposedly requires considerable amount
of effort to fix, or I read about how extremely stable Gentoo systems are and
require almost no maintenance.

It seems like there's some dissonance here and I'm not sure where this comes
from.

~~~
hiena03
I was a Gentoo user about 5 years ago. With Gentoo you can have both, if you
only use stable packages you shouldn't broke your system. But if you are using
bleeding edge packages thinks can break.

~~~
accelbred
Current Gentoo user. I find the opposite. Using unstable, things just work.
Sometimes package updates fail to compile but your system is still fine, and
the package will get fixed eventually. Never had an update break my system on
unstable. Stable often had issues, which I presume is due to devs mostly
working on unstable.

------
hprotagonist
LFS, or gentoo from a stage 1 tarball, is something that is extremely valuable
to do.

Once. Once is usually enough.

~~~
IgorPartola
I ran Gentoo in college for a couple of years. Oh god the compilation.

~~~
rvense
I ran Gentoo for about a week a long time ago. On a 400 MHz Powermac G4. By
which I mean, I installed Gentoo once and then decided I didn't like it.

~~~
timw4mail
It still works for PowerPC Macs :)

------
jake_morrison
I find Linux From Scratch a bit masochistic. Embedded Linux development is
equally educational while actually being useful. There are good frameworks
like Buildroot: [https://buildroot.org/](https://buildroot.org/)

~~~
pfranz
I think a bit of masochism is the point. I did it once to fill in all of the
gaps and cement all the dependencies when putting together a system. That kind
of knowledge helps when you're trying to do server maintenance but try and
keep the system up or do crazier things but be fairly confident certain parts
won't be affected.

I can't see myself using a LFS system in production.

~~~
jake_morrison
I ran Gentoo for a few years, and it was a great balance of being low level
and customizable but practical for day to day use. When you have set things up
from scratch, you can fix it when it breaks. The Gentoo install disk helped me
recover many a server. I got tired of the endless compilation, though.

------
baddox
After seeing this headline I was just thinking it would be a lot of fun to
dive back into Linux 15 years after I was last a desktop Linux user. It would
be fun to try Linux From Scratch, or Gentoo if that’s still a thing. Then I
realized I don’t even own any normal PC hardware that I could do that with
without some wrangling (I could probably technically get it working on my old
Intel iMac or my Synology NAS, but that’s not really the challenge I’m looking
for). It’s wild to think that 15-20 years ago I was obsessed with Linux and
spending my free time trying to get graphics drivers and dual monitors to
work, and now I barely even have any traditional PC hardware.

~~~
seabrookmx
> I barely even have any traditional PC hardware

Can you elaborate?

Are you using a Macbook or something instead?

~~~
BossingAround
Probably tablets, phone, or something similar..?

------
Tainnor
I have tried LFS before because I thought it would teach me more about Linux
(been a desktop Linux user since 2006, having tried a number of distributions,
including Arch, and more recently back on Ubuntu, but never dug deep into
internals).

However, I found I didn't really learn much and was just blindly executing
steps. It's fun for a while to watch the magic, but maybe there is some better
way to consume the material? I found that I wasn't really getting enough
context around what was happening to appreciate what was being done and why at
every stage.

Maybe someone can suggest something?

~~~
samvher
Interesting - my experience was that I learned a lot from it not so much by
blindly executing the steps, but by things not working the way they were
supposed to. This forced me to dive into the details and understand what was
going on. (This is probably 15 years ago though - maybe the instructions have
gotten better :) )

------
ExcavateGrandMa
What I retain from all of this...

I salute the fact he did work on the hint I gave on their "weirdly handled"
irc chat on freenode... (you may be able to find some logs...). And they
succeeded! I'm very happy that now the public is gonna have the clean way to
produce an operating system with Gnu tools & Linux.

While I was very kind sharing with them they didn't appreciate I wasn't giving
solution "directly" and clearly thrown stuff to me like I'm a noob speaking
too much of thing I don't master... well, it was very surprising to me to end
in this situation... I even asked bdubbs itself to support me with that... he
thrown me that "he doesn't handle irc chat only book writing...". I was kind
of meh I just left their chat...

The result of this weird context pushed me into this view:

THEY ARE BUILDING GNU/LINUX SINCE 20years! and 20 years later they are still
waiting information to drops from sky... and then acts like pioneerrs...

This went far the edges limits! go in hell NOOBS!

------
TeeMassive
I'm 30 and I can't believe I didn't do this pilgrimage yet.

When will this be ready?

~~~
mvanveen
I'm almost 31 and I said the same thing to myself this weekend.

Ironically coincident with this announcement, I ended up going through LFS and
managed to get a kernel compiled using an entirely bootstrapped toolchain.

About halfway through I noticed the development version they're discussing,
which is available here:
[http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/development/](http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/development/)

I believe this version is likely able to be run-through but please keep in
mind it looks like it's been changing every few days!

To the point of other commentators mentioning it can get a little tedious,
especially in chapter 6- I think the new revised edition they're working on
could help with that somewhat as it looks like avoiding the /tools buildout
will help minimize the number of packages that need to get rebuilt.

~~~
tdsamardzhiev
We can start a study group.

"Uncles doing LFS"

------
photon12
Lots of comments so far about using Linux From Scratch to learn about the
userspace/kernelspace interaction, and while that's all feasible you can do
this on basically any distro.

This week I've been iteratively rebuilding the kernel and glibc and the vDSO
on my Ubuntu Server 20.04 install and learning a ton about the interactions,
while also having the Ubuntu apt repositories to fall back on for when I want
to switch from "learning mode" to "just get this task done mode."

------
Ericson2314
We really need to fix GCC so that the libraries and compiler can be built
separately (like Clang).

------
ExcavateGrandMa
Am glad to have taught them something before they thrown me out \o/

Tools to empower robbery... AND ACT LIKE PIONEER :D

I swear what you do... SINCERELY!

------
kgraves
Is there a reputable startup / company that employs Linux kernel developers?

~~~
sfoley
Red Hat?

~~~
person_of_color
Google?

