I've built a few LFSs and Gentoo countless times, it was a great learning experience and I learned a lot of command line mad skillz that way. However I wouldn't run a server using it.
Welcome to Linux From Scratch
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Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#12Hate to post a comment just to be negative, but, I seriously can't believe this has appeared on the front page of a site like HN. "Welcome to"?. LFS is so old that I would assume any self proclaimed geek/hacker would've already been aware of it. It has existed for over ten years.
It's just the title of the page, it's not saying it's new, just welcoming you to it.
Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#13LFS definitely provides an excellent learning opportunity to the beginner. However, I think, considering the clarity of the available documentation, there is little to "think". Having said that, I have always considered LFS to be a kind of personal linux. For running on servers, I think Gentoo would be the closest to LFS and having well matured tools and package management.
Gentoo is indeed a very nice option in between a bog-standard distro like Ubuntu and LFS. It's easy to customize and tinker with, but still usable on a day-to-day basis.
If you want something in between Gentoo and LFS, you could consider OpenEmbedded, which is a distro builder primarily intended for specialized embedded/low-power hardware, but can easily be repurposed and extended to also build your own x86 desktop distro's, using one of the more generic profiles as a template. It would take a lot of tinkering and learning (but that's the point, right?), but once you have it working it's relatively easy to extend and maintain.
Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#14LFS definitely provides an excellent learning opportunity to the beginner. However, I think, considering the clarity of the available documentation, there is little to "think". Having said that, I have always considered LFS to be a kind of personal linux. For running on servers, I think Gentoo would be the closest to LFS and having well matured tools and package management.
Gentoo is indeed a very nice option in between a bog-standard distro like Ubuntu and LFS. It's easy to customize and tinker with, but still usable on a day-to-day basis. If you want something in between Gentoo and LFS, you could consider OpenEmbedded, which is a distro builder primarily intended for specialized embedded/low-power hardware, but can easily be repurposed and extended to also build your own x86 desktop d…
Arch Linux deserves a mention here.
Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#15Does anyone feels LFS leans a bit outside its own point ?
I felt like I was learning more about gcc/make/autoconf more than the OS itself. The relationship between packages, how the OS interacts with hardware was still obscure. After a successful first reboot I tried to build elinks and while it ran, it was broken in many strange ways (tty rendering, dns lookups failing sometime).
It's a inspiring project, but IMHO it could be split into two goals, toolchain/compilation and operating system assembly.
Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#16Hate to post a comment just to be negative, but, I seriously can't believe this has appeared on the front page of a site like HN. "Welcome to"?. LFS is so old that I would assume any self proclaimed geek/hacker would've already been aware of it. It has existed for over ten years.
> It has existed for over ten years.
So? I haven't heard of it before, and I doubt if many of my friends have either. Programming landscape is very big now and everyone has a finite amount of time for exploring it. I could use your argument to whine about how so many self proclaimed geeks/hackers don't know about Lisp and keep reinventing wheels all the time.
Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#17I liked LFS, it was the first distro I ever installed that didn't annoy me with "What? What's all this crap been installed for?!"
But the lack of a package manager prompted me to move on to Gentoo. I keep meaning to give it another go, never seem to have the time..
Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#18Well. It's very nice project. Thanks that, I've learnt quite much about building essentional environment. However it's tough as hell. I know pretty much about Linux and Operating Systems, low level programming, but it was just impossible to me to succeed some time ago. I admire anybody who can build it properly. :P
To people who want to give a try I'd say - sure, do it. It's worth it, but don't expect it's going to work. :)
Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#19Anyone with a kindle version of this?
Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gentoo is indeed a very nice option in between a bog-standard distro like Ubuntu and LFS. It's easy to customize and tinker with, but still usable on a day-to-day basis. If you want something in between Gentoo and LFS, you could consider OpenEmbedded, which is a distro builder primarily intended for specialized embedded/low-power hardware, but can easily be repurposed and extended to also build your own x86 desktop d…
Arch Linux deserves a mention here. http://www.archlinux.org/
Am I right in saying that Arch still doesn't have package signing by default? I know they've been working on adding it. Until it has that it can't really be used imo.