Linux from Scratch • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux from Scratch

#41

Post by BeetleB » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:38 PM UTC

From "20 Years of Gentoo" (https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/):

    "Even more common: “Oh, I’m not going to use Gentoo. I want to go all the way and use LFS!”

    They never heed my warnings about it. Every one of them either quits in the middle of the install, or soon after, and swears off source based distributions for life.

    Slackware and LFS are the Haskells of the Linux distribution world. People jump to the extreme end of the spectrum, and either get burnt or remain unproductive for life, when they should have just used OCaml or F# instead."

Re: Linux from Scratch

#42

Post by neptunicmess » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

Linux from Scratch is great for building a deeper understanding of how the different parts in linux systems work together at their foundation. Working through it also made me appreciate what distributions and package managers actually provide to me even more. However, i do often read people stating it helped them to "understand linux". Not sure what that means to be frank. Because you do not learn much about actually doing things with or on linux. You learn, essentially, how to knock together a linux system from the various components, the core part being, setting up a compiler (if i remember correctly, you rebuild gcc three times in the process to get an "untainted" compiler), i.e. build something like a distro pre-cursor if you will. These are great skills to have, but also very specific ones. They aren't helping you much in your day to day use of linux. I think everyone serious about linux should do LFS at least once in their career (and, contrary to some popular statements, you actually can do it quite early on, if you can read and follow a manual), just maybe don't have false expectations about what it will actually be teaching you.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#43

Post by noosphr » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

cbdevidal wrote: post #21

I did this in 2001 on a 200MHz Pentium with 128MB RAM. Took about eight hours. Great experience. I understand it still takes about eight hours. Faster CPUs but busier software cancelled each other out. Some things never change.

I did it in 2011 and it was 8 hours then too.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#44

Post by yread » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter08/g...

> the test suite for Glibc is considered critical. Do not skip it under any circumstance.

> Generally a few tests do not pass. The test failures listed below are usually safe to ignore.

I felt a bit uneasy writing something similar into my software e2e test suite, but hey if glibc can do it, why not!

> It's imperative to strictly follow these steps above unless you completely understand what you are doing. Any unexpected deviation may render the system completely unusable. YOU ARE WARNED.

Is this the Dark Souls of linux distros?

Re: Linux from Scratch

#45

Post by rustybolt » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

neptunicmess wrote: post #42

Linux from Scratch is great for building a deeper understanding of how the different parts in linux systems work together at their foundation. Working through it also made me appreciate what distributions and package managers actually provide to me even more. However, i do often read people stating it helped them to "understand linux". Not sure what that means to be frank. Because you do not learn much about actually…

Yeah I've gone through Linux from Scratch twice, but at some point I found myself just copy-pasting and to be honest I've never really understood how one would go from here to a modern distro (besides compiling a helluva lot more software).

Re: Linux from Scratch

#46

Post by kanbankaren » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

As someone who has been using Linux as a daily driver for 25+ years and also used linuxfromscratch.org for building some packages, I would say, don't waste you time building from scratch. There is very little utility unless you are maintaining some arcane system professionally.

Stick to RPM based systems as dnf supports transactions. The ability to look at history of package installation and rollback to a known state solves most admin issues.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#47

Post by kwanbix » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC

necovek wrote: post #11

This was probably the best thing I've done to learn the ins and outs of a running Linux system: I think it would be amazing to re-do it with a modern Linux stack (systemd + Wayland), but it can really remove all the "magic" from the full OS implementation for you. However, I've done it in 1999 and ran that system until 2001 when it became too much of a trouble to recompile everything and battle dependencies manually…

I actually tried this back around 1999 as well.

At the time, it felt like I was just being told "type this" and "type that", with very little explanation of what anything meant or why it was done one way instead of another.

Maybe after all these years it’s worth giving it another shot? Does it work on a VM?

Re: Linux from Scratch

#48

Post by rascul » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:53 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #4

steve1977 wrote: post #2

It's been years since I went through this, but whenever someone asks me what they should read to get a deeper understanding of what a Linux distribution is, I point them to this.

Yup, it's where I got a lot of my linux knowledge. I think that Gentoo or even Arch would provide pretty close to the same education level, though, with a lot less time to install.

> I think that Gentoo or even Arch would provide pretty close to the same education level, though, with a lot less time to install.

it only takes three commands to install Gentoo

cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6

that's the first one

https://web.archive.org/web/20230601013339/http://bash.org/?...

Re: Linux from Scratch

#49

Post by zomiaen » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:53 PM UTC

kanbankaren wrote: post #46

As someone who has been using Linux as a daily driver for 25+ years and also used linuxfromscratch.org for building some packages, I would say, don't waste you time building from scratch. There is very little utility unless you are maintaining some arcane system professionally. Stick to RPM based systems as dnf supports transactions. The ability to look at history of package installation and rollback to a known state…

You're looking at it incorrectly. LFS is an exercise in learning for the sake of it, and therefore, not a waste of time. This isn't intended to be easy, but to expose and teach you the lowest levels of creating a functioning install.

Re: Linux from Scratch

#50

Post by guerrilla » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 8:53 PM UTC

yread wrote: post #44

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter08/g... > the test suite for Glibc is considered critical. Do not skip it under any circumstance. > Generally a few tests do not pass. The test failures listed below are usually safe to ignore. I felt a bit uneasy writing something similar into my software e2e test suite, but hey if glibc can do it, why not! > It's imperative to strictly follow these steps above…

> Is this the Dark Souls of linux distros?

haha Yes. That's a bit what it feels like.