Linux From Scratch 12.0 Published For Rolling Your Own Linux Build

[PluMGMK]

The people that build, maintain, and contribute to the Arch Linux Documentation Wiki are modern day saints as are the people that take the time to put together the LFS (Linux From Scratch) guide.

Hear hear!

Anyway, LFS-er here since 2015… This pkg-config versus pkgconf thing had escaped my notice, does anyone know the difference?

[BwackNinja]

Hear hear!

Anyway, LFS-er here since 2015… This pkg-config versus pkgconf thing had escaped my notice, does anyone know the difference?

pkgconf is a lighter implementation that doesn't depend on glib, so it's nicer as a part of a small system

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It's really nice that projects like LFS exist and are so prominent. They give interested folks an opportunity to see how a system is built so they're no longer intimidated by what's underneath. It would be nice if more people got comfortable with that. Maintaining your own system, rather than needing distro maintainers to do it for you, shouldn't be as difficult as it is.

[NovenTheHero]

I did LFS this summer just because and all I really did was copy/paste and follow the directions. I am not sure that I really learned anything.

I was considering doing LFS on my old Pentium 166 but I would need a modern build environment unless I did the CLFS, but that is probably beyond my meager toolset. Arch would be an option if i586 was supported, but there is a Gentoo i586 build.

[Ezakimak]

After getting frustrated with binary distro configuration (I ran various RPM and dpkg distros for 5 years) I switched to LFS and ran that as my primary desktop for 3 years.

LFS is /great/ for learning how the various daemons expect to be configured natively. Which is exactly what I wanted to learn, since the binary distros added (or tried to add) layers of abstraction over the native configurations--which is helpful for most simple use cases, but when something goes wrong now you have to chase and debug both:
- maybe they created their own configuration language and you got that wrong
- maybe the distro tool produced the wrong output for the daemon's native configuration
- or maybe it just doesn't even let you produce the correct native configuration needed for the feature/behavior you want, which becomes much more frustrating if you don't know what the daemon even wants natively to begin with.

After using (and contributing to) LFS for several years, it gets tedious, not because it doesn't work--it works great, you get exactly what you want, but because of lack of dependency and package management (which maybe they've since added). I was introduced to gentoo 18 years ago and found it to be a perfect middle ground.

Gentoo isn't technically a distribution. it's a "meta" distribution. Yes, you can use it by itself as a distribution and most people probably do. What I value it for is:
- it doesn't provide an abstraction over daemon's native configuration, you always get to use their native config, thus their man pages always apply--no extra debugging steps or tool getting in the way there.
- it also has one of the best ports-style package managers of any distribution. Updates always calculate a complete, correct dep graph and your system will never get stuck in a broken state (unlike LFS where you could possibly update to mismatched package versions and possibly get into trouble).

As for being a "meta" distro--it can easily be used to create binary packages, produce a repo around them, and then be used to distribute that snapshot of a system configuration as a "distro" to other machines via the network or by creating installation media. It has excellent tools to help do all of this. You can very easily create tiny bare-bones, special-purpose systems with it--even cross-compiled for other architectures. I know this because at a prior employer I used it to create and maintain a live install disk for a linux app that supported 6 different architectures--gentoo made it not only possible but also made it fairly easy to maintain once all configured.

I recommend everyone who wants to learn, do LFS for a while, then with that knowledge go and choose whatever distro you want, whatever you learned will be transferable.

[stiiixy]

I did LFS this summer just because and all I really did was copy/paste and follow the directions. I am not sure that I really learned anything.

I went to a sporting school, so PC's weren't a priority, but at this particular high school in the 90's, teachers there and then were already lamenting how the effects of a PC can reduce one's retention of knowledge.

The repititious nature of schooling, effectively bashing in to your memory for even the dumberest of dummies, essential knowlefge like 1+1 or the use of apostrophe's, has been almost removed as accessibility to said knowledge has increased.

Quite the paradox. Personally, I always thought the Internet was going to be the greatest knowledge tool ever created.

Boy, was I so fucking wrong.

[NovenTheHero]

I went to a sporting school, so PC's weren't a priority, but at this particular high school in the 90's, teachers there and then were already lamenting how the effects of a PC can reduce one's retention of knowledge.

The repititious nature of schooling, effectively bashing in to your memory for even the dumberest of dummies, essential knowlefge like 1+1 or the use of apostrophe's, has been almost removed as accessibility to said knowledge has increased.

Quite the paradox. Personally, I always thought the Internet was going to be the greatest knowledge tool ever created.

Boy, was I so fucking wrong.

It is amazing to have the access to information at our fingertips that we have, but my students have little incentive to retain information (I'm a teacher). It is less about remembering stuff now and trying to teach them how it is useful and how to use the information.

[creative]

Sort of resurrecting a dead thread here. An interesting project I came across that's been around for quite some time and yes I even heard of it but never looked into really using it. It seems to be just a few steps away from LFS. So if you want to start getting your mind in a mode to begin and start tackling LFS—a good place to start is CRUX. CRUX may destroy you.

I was watching a guy do a build of it in a video from about ten years ago, its on youtube. I could definitely see where he was coming from reflecting back on some of my memories of building cutting edge DAW stuff back when a lot of it came out, which was a ton of projects and libraries with stupid amounts of dependencies but I can tell you right here what I went through isn't anything like what that guy went through with CRUX, it's pretty brutal. Although I do remember having to write my own XFree86 configuration file once on Slackware for my video card, the Slackware of the earlier 2000's was closer to the CRUX of today except you had a lot more libraries and built a lot less from source. After all Slackware is a binary distribution which its aim was always to provide you almost all the tools you need to build everything else you want from source manually.

CRUX is a true source based distribution.

Good place to test your metal.

So it's not Slackware, Gentoo, or laughably even Arch. It's actually CRUX as a distribution you want to start with.

[creative]

I did LFS this summer just because and all I really did was copy/paste and follow the directions. I am not sure that I really learned anything.

I was considering doing LFS on my old Pentium 166 but I would need a modern build environment unless I did the CLFS, but that is probably beyond my meager toolset. Arch would be an option if i586 was supported, but there is a Gentoo i586 build.

See this is why you shouldn't do that, the only thing you should be using to copy is a pencil to journal. Even scientists keep journals. And yes what you are working on is a computer science project, it just doesn't involve programming in the classical sense, nor getting down to the traces, capacitors, resisters, IC's MOSFETs, transformers, power delivery, etc. When you're writing stuff down and then reading it and typing it in, you have to ask yourself what is it that your are typing and how does it function and for what? Why is it that what you just typed work? How does it work? Even stopping to think to consider the special tools those genius coders wrote that are bits and pieces of a command line string which are program binaries from them. I have gone so far at certain points in my life to look in /sbin or /bin to open or at least try to open up and look at some of the tools there. Sometimes they are a dead simple little shell script to save a person time from typing and actually learning something.

I'm not an elitist, far from it. A lot of the time I am just a silly goofball. The programmers that put all the GNU utilities together, those are the elite. It's the hardcore coders that are some of the real magicians and wizards in the geek world.

[stiiixy]

I remember when coding had goofy things. Those highly intelligent coders had to release somehow, and injected all manner of oddities in to their work.

The whole fishing thing (baiting, phishing, trolling, slap in the face with a cold fish from IRC) origins still eludes me. Might cast a net and see what I catch.

[varikonniemi]

My experience is that most complexity comes not from building toolchain but from building toolchain into another prefix. That needs various ./configure flags to be correctly specified.

ON the other hand, if instead of LFS you try bootstrapping from a tiny subsector sized seed and follow https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bo...ster/parts.rst in some sense it becomes even then if you pick LFS as starting point.

Thank you! For bringing this to my attention, i have for years been occasionally pondering over how to practically defeat the "virulent c compiler" attack, and now i don't have to any longer since someone has actually published a convenient way demonstrating it.