

Linux From Scratch 7.1 Published - 3.2.6 Kernel + GCC 4.6.2 - kruhft
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linux-From-Scratch-7-1-published-1463152.html

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sirclueless
I did this once before and it was instructional and fun (for a certain
definition of fun). If you like hacking around on your system, this is a great
way to understand a lot of the moving parts in Linux.

I still like the idea of a minimally patched system built and configured from
the ground up. Building everything from source takes a long time, so I didn't
do Linux-From-Scratch more than once and instead most of my linux machines are
now running ArchLinux, which has a similar philosophy about systems except
that they distribute compiled binaries.

Anyways, if you haven't built many programs from source before, this is a
great way to get a curated introduction. Worth it in many ways.

~~~
zackattack
> Worth it in many ways.

Can you elaborate? Part of my everyday life as a coder is downloading packages
and building them, so I'm curious how this brings more to the table. I flipped
through the book (<http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/7.1/>) and
couldn't tell..

~~~
sirclueless
Before I built LFS, I had only a rough idea of the internals of the C build
system and Linux runtime. Basically, I just knew that I had a recent GCC and
some surface-visible tools like make, autoconf etc. and most software built
just fine when I needed it to. The process of bootstrapping a clean GCC that
operates in a chroot-jail and then using that to construct build a system from
the ground up -- kernel, glibc and all -- gives great insight into the
dependencies and build process of each of these basic packages.

It's great that the Linux world has become so sugar-coated, and typical build
instructions for source packages nowadays can be as simple as a list of apt-
get packages to install followed by "./configure && make && sudo make install"
but this glosses over an awful lot, and turns your build and runtime
dependencies into a black box.

~~~
chimeracoder
> ./configure && make && sudo make install

When I used Ubuntu, I'm not sure I ever even needed that.

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tomdeakin
I gave an old version of this a go a long time ago. It was really very time
consuming. I would be interested in doing it again though now that I have more
of an idea about compiling from source.. I was still very new to it then. I
felt that you have to be pretty switched on to this before you start.

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nwmcsween
My ideal distribution would be somewhat of a meta distribution allowing from
source (meaning git, svn) control as well as binary installation. These are a
few idea's I've had regarding this:

* Parse build systems such as configure.in, Tupfile.. for options and dependencies and use simple machine learning for classification of options

* Use some sort of locality sensitive hashing to sort packages thus easy to categorize without arbitrary naming

* Meta framework allowing for building different package formats such as rpm, deb..etc.

* Quality control as well as PGO and such via rspec (or something as malleable).

Gentoo or Exherbo do all by hand and in shell which becomes time consuming and
incredibly brittle. All this could easily be broken down into individual
parts.

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cicloid
Call me crazy, but somehow LFS+(Puppet|Chef) makes a lot of sense... :|

~~~
sirclueless
If you're thinking of heading down this road, there is also Automated Linux
From Scratch.

<http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/alfs/>

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wazoox
As an aside, on recent hardware it's not as long as it used to be, you
certainly can compile the base system (kernel, glibc, udev, and most base
commands) in a single 8 hours day.

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ronbeltran
I built my first LFS inside Virtualbox, it was slow. Fun starts at Beyond LFS
(BLFS). Never finished it, installed Ubuntu instead and be productive.

