Linux from Scratch

Creating is easy, maintaining is difficult.

So many good memories I had running through this way back when and it gave such a good and deep look into how a fully functioning system worked. It removed a lot of the mystery of this distro vs that distro and how all the pieces fit together. I still use some of the knowledge I gained from this in my day-to-day work, some of which is sorely lacking by others doing seemingly the same job as me.

I remember going through this and there was a point where you were running a stock, generic kernel before having built a specialized kernel with modules and options you wanted. I apparently ran up against thermal limits on this laptop because power management was one of the options for you to configure. I had to zoom through that section with a box fan pointed at that laptop so I could get power management and throttling to work so it wouldn't randomly shut down. Good times.

I used the same laptop I went through the first time with the same LFS install for a number of years after that until my day job killed my interest in doing this stuff in my free time. I switched to Debian after that and never looked back.

Like others are saying, I always recommend going through this for those that want a deeper understanding of linux, the kernel, and all its accoutrements.

One of the most incredible computer experiences.

I completed my Cross-Linux From Scratch distro in 2014, targeting the original Raspberry Pi since I was frustrated with the lack of (at the time) minimalist distros.

It was extra-hard, due to the cross-compiling nature of targeting the ARMv6 cpu family - but I learned a massive amount along the way.

Even though CentOS-minimal was released for Raspberry Pi by time I completed the project, I had so much fun it didn't matter. I ended up making a custom build system, consisting of a hodgepodge of bash scripts all wrapped together with a Makefile. My self-hosted Jenkins build server (old mini computer shoved on my book case) would run builds and produce the image artifact - those were the days...

The final distro image was ~40MB, which was impressive to me on it's own.

I've completed it along with BLFS and I just don't really agree.

Like, yes you get pretty familiar with autotools, sed, and patch. However, a lot of LFS is in fact just managing disk partitions and moving files around.

LFS also glosses over a lot of pretty important parts like kernel configuration.

The docs from both Gentoo and Arch, on the other hand, are much more complete and practical in explaining things and also troubleshooting problems. And at the end of the process you're left with a system that can be easily maintained.

LFS is harder, but that doesn't really mean you end up learning more. Especially since it's pretty easy to lose focus and just rely on copy/pasting the next command to run.

Edit: Just an example of what I mean.

Here is the LFS discussion of filesystems.

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter02/c...

And here is the same Gentoo discussion.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Dis...