Linux From Scratch 7.1 Published 94
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."
Just in case... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just in case... (Score:5, Funny)
girlfriend
LOL .. Good one.
Re:Just in case... (Score:5, Funny)
Just because you're stalking her doesn't make her your girlfriend.
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...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.
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*real work*.
Is that what the kids are calling it these days? I wouldn't know - I'm too busy at my job doing this thing we simply call "work" on systems that were built with exactly that in mind. Of course, that is also one of the reasons why I will not be attempting any LFS builds any time soon.
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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.
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hairyfeet makes some good contributions to this website.
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I must be working too hard... (Score:3)
When I saw the headline, I thought that the article described how you could create a linux kernel using http://scratch.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]
Which would have been a hell of a neat trick.
myke
Re:I must be working too hard... (Score:5, Funny)
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Let's go create an x86 CPU in Wireworld.
Everyone should do a LFS install at least once (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 (Score:4, Informative)
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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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once (Score:4, Funny)
Thank you for the remarkably informative post.
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Be a real Jedi, do CLFS instead (Score:2)
... and do it in Cygwin targeting x686. I've done it :P
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Oh yeah, LFS is fun. I ported mine to my old Sun Sparc box.
Re:Everyone should do a LFS install at least once (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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If you want something more maintainable I'd suggest Gentoo. It gives you most of the flexibility of LFS, and exposure to enough of what is going on that you're likely to keep learning. It is also a lot easier to keep up-to-date.
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Same with me.
Did it once while in university, and it was ran as my desktop system for many months.
Just gave up because it was hard to upgrade the system.
But it was a rewarding experience.
Glad I did it while I had some spare time, as I feel never in my life I'll be able to do it again.
Or maybe when I'm retired?
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But it was a rewarding experience. Glad I did it while I had some spare time, as I feel never in my life I'll be able to do it again.
Exactly. I miss school... mostly for the craploads of free time I had.
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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.
No. Anyone who works with Linux, develops for Linux, is a Linux sysadmin or just happens to be interested should do it at least once. Then there's us who prefer distros of the more automated type (I'd rather avoid terms like "beginner-friendly", "user-friendly" or "bloated" but you probably know what I mean). People who use some flavour of Linux simply because it fits our needs. We shouldn't go anywhere near LFS.
Re:bah plain old recipe (Score:5, Funny)
I dare someone to try this without gcc compiler and gnu userland.
fuck off, RMS.
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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.
Re:bah plain old recipe (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Can you build it in Clang?
THis was discussed 6 years ago here and the Linux Kernel has many GCC specific headers and hooks that it wont compile in anything else.
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Don't forget all the fake nerds out there... you know, the blonde cheerleaders who put on the fake glasses and say they're nerds cause they play XBox...
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10 million nerds with 1000 fake profiles. multiple personality disorder could make this the year of the linux desktop!
No it won't!..Yes it will!
No it won't!...Yes it will!
No it won't!....*sigh* No it won't! Wait, what?
eBook formats? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 they would make some sort of Portable Document Format...
Re:eBook formats? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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
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I think if you where going to use this, then you'd probably want the ability to copy and paste that exists in the html version.
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Use Calibre to convert it.
Dear Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you want differently than what clicking ont he subject does?
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How is it obvious that clicking the comment title collapses and opens the threaded discussion following it? What part of "comment title" says to you "window shade"?
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Comment titles are not clickable for me.
Form scratch? (Score:2, Funny)
To build Linux from scratch you first have to ... Make universe
Carl Sagan
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Done.
no livecd (Score:3)
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?
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Well... the last I built an LFS system, I went to the only source of a known functional toolchain without jumping through 300 needless hoops I could think of... I unpacked a Gentoo stage3, chrooted, and started my LFS build from there (which, no, does not mean a necessity to actually *install* Gentoo on the host system. I was working from an old RIP USB I had on hand).
Re:no livecd (Score:5, Informative)
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 [linuxfromscratch.org].
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I was bummed after looking over the LFS intro, in that you aren't building Linux on a bare machine -- you're starting with a pre-installed distro of some kind.
I would be more interested in replicating the process that Torvalds went through when creating the OS.
Re:no livecd (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I was bummed after looking over the LFS intro, in that you aren't building Linux on a bare machine -- you're starting with a pre-installed distro of some kind.
I would be more interested in replicating the process that Torvalds went through when creating the OS.
IIRC Torvalds had Minix pre-installed on his machine while he was first building Linux.
Any such thing for BSD? (Score:2)