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Linux from Scratch

linuxfromscratch.org

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Re: Linux from Scratch

#11

Post by pushupentry1219 »

sieste wrote: post #3

I really like the idea, really tried following the process several times. But each time it just turned into a copy-incomprehensible-commands-into-the-terminal exercise at some point, and I lost motivation. Did anyone experience the same?

When I was in highschool I had a bunch of free time outside of school days. I used a YouTube guide to install Arch. I failed many many times. But in doing so I almost kind of learnt what each command was doing.

I had the same experience when I installed Gentoo. In both cases at first I was copy/pasting commands, but through failure I ended up understanding a lot of what the commands did.

And what someone else said below is true as well, actually try and force yourself to understand what you're typing. Even briefly just scanning a man page helps a lot.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#12

Post by thom »

harha_ wrote: post #6

What's the fun in this? I once looked into it briefly and it's what I guessed: mostly about building and installing the required software individually. That's boring, I guess the fun would be in building an actual usable distro "from scratch".

The first run isn't much fun. There are useful skills in just knowing how to build stuff, and knowing all the constituent parts of a running system. But overall I suspect you'd learn more in a year of using Arch.

But on subsequent play-throughs, you get to be creative! Want to ignore the FHS and try putting your apps somewhere weird? Want to use a different libc or init system? Build everything around an esoteric shell? Go for maximum optimisation? It's the replayability that makes Linux from Scratch fun, and yes, totally worth working out what your own distro might look like.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#13

Post by mbivert »

harha_ wrote: post #6

What's the fun in this? I once looked into it briefly and it's what I guessed: mostly about building and installing the required software individually. That's boring, I guess the fun would be in building an actual usable distro "from scratch".

You can think of a LFS as training before actually tackling an original distribution: distributions are complex, even following the steps of a LFS won't necessarily yield a working system (lots of room for mistakes).

Or, as a base to build a distribution: you can automatize some of the process, slap a pkgsrc on top, etc.

For budding programmers, it's a great exercise: discover software, appreciate dependencies, understand components of a Linux distribution, learn how to build things from source, configure a kernel, etc.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#14

Post by pipes »

sieste wrote: post #3

I really like the idea, really tried following the process several times. But each time it just turned into a copy-incomprehensible-commands-into-the-terminal exercise at some point, and I lost motivation. Did anyone experience the same?

Yes this and endlessly unzipping things. I gave up after many many hours. I doubt I learned much from it.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#16

Post by kwanbix »

sieste wrote: post #3

I really like the idea, really tried following the process several times. But each time it just turned into a copy-incomprehensible-commands-into-the-terminal exercise at some point, and I lost motivation. Did anyone experience the same?

Same for me. I tried it about 20 years ago. I didn't fell like I was learning anything, just copy paste like you say. I haven't retried since, but I think it would be much better if they explain what you are doing and why.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#17

Post by yonatan8070 »

devilkin wrote: post #5

I did this, once, on a 386. Did I learn things? Definitely. Will I ever do it again? Definitely not ;)

I wonder, if you were to script all the commands you ran back in the day, and ran that same script on your old 386 and on a modern system with a top-of-the-line AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, how much faster would it run?

Re: Linux from Scratch

#18

Post by fourfour3 »

yonatan8070 wrote: post #17
devilkin wrote: post #5

I did this, once, on a 386. Did I learn things? Definitely. Will I ever do it again? Definitely not ;)

I wonder, if you were to script all the commands you ran back in the day, and ran that same script on your old 386 and on a modern system with a top-of-the-line AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, how much faster would it run?

Especially with the increase in storage performance - going from a hard disk that might have even still been using PIO modes to modern NVMe would be gigantic

Re: Linux from Scratch

#20

Post by spockz »

exe34 wrote: post #9
sieste wrote: post #3

I really like the idea, really tried following the process several times. But each time it just turned into a copy-incomprehensible-commands-into-the-terminal exercise at some point, and I lost motivation. Did anyone experience the same?

it's better if you try to work out what the commands and options are doing. I did this a long time ago, and 15 years later, I realise that it gave me a big advantage over my colleagues who haven't done something like that. "missing xxxxx.so" - they don't even know what that means, whereas I'm already trying to find the so and putting it in ld_library_path to see if it helps.

In my experience, whenever a .so was missing it was either due to a missing package on the os package manager level, or a completely broken gcc or llvm setup. I never needed to explicitly add single .so files to a path. (Besides the use case where I specifically wanted to override a malloc implementation.)

In which cases did/do you need to add individual files?

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