31–40 of 164 posts
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?
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".
If you want to just build an existing distro from scratch then they all have ways of doing that as they need to rebuild packages regularly. Eg: It’s a lot simpler to build a fedora image from scratch by using Koji/OSBuild vs LFS as Koji/OSBuild basically automate the whole LFS process.
Additionally in order to have fun with LFS you don’t really need to do the whole book. You can make your own little Linux “distro” from scratch with the kernel and statically linked busybox. Busybox comes with all the minimal utilities so you can pick and choose what you want to write and what you want to reuse.
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?
I tried several times, and tried again just recently. I share your sentiment. It perhaps gave me a renewed appreciation of the huge benefits Linux ditributions and package managers give us.
When trying to learn by copy-pasting from the internet, I sometimes get tripped up over older/newer Linuxes using different versions of commands or best practices. (e.g. ipconfig vs. ifconfig, iptables vs. successors)
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 be…
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".
> building an actual usable distro "from scratch". could you say a few words on how this would avoid building and installing the required software individually? are you thinking of osdev instead?
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 would start with LFS to build a base and then add your own package manager to make a “true” distro. If you want to just build an existing distro from scratch then they all have ways of doing that as they need to rebuild packages regularly. Eg: It’s a lot simpler to build a fedora image from scratch by using Koji/OSBuild vs LFS as Koji/OSBuild basically automate the whole LFS process. Additionally in order to have…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I agree with the comment you are replying to. Having broken my home Linux installs too many times has taught me how to diagnose and fix this sort of issues.