Making bespoke linux distros should be quite a good fit for LLM agents, especially given the recent results with the LLM-authored web browser.
You mean the browser where the result was mostly faked and exaggerated?
Linux from Scratch
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: Linux from Scratch
#62Every time I see this, I upvote it I’m sure it’s different than it was when I was a teenager but building Linux from scratch was the thing that got me into computers as a kid It shows that computers can be accessible _and modifiable_ at the lowest levels
It is a bit different indeed - more things to compile nowadays. Things such as LLVM take quite some time to compile too. cmake and meson is also needed these days.
Other than that it still works fairly well.
Re: Linux from Scratch
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having installed Arch myself a couple of times, i think i would disagree. Not really much in that process that teaches you how linux actually works. It's more just about managing disk partitions and moving files around than anything else. LFS is just on a whole different level, and is on my bucket list to complete the entire process one day.
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 als…
Gentoo I understand but Arch? Does Arch go into compilation that much?
Re: Linux from Scratch
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Other point is long time maintainability as well.. Like unistalling stuff you don't need etc. Or LFS solves it?
I used versioned AppDirs for that, e. g. /Programs/Python/3.13/. If I don't need it anymore, the directory is removed and a script runs. Similar to GoboLinux. I do however had not use GoboLinux right now; GoboLinux unfortunately lacks documentation, LFS/BLFS has better documentation. Finding information these days is hard - google search has become sooooo bad ...
Re: Linux from Scratch
#65From "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. Peopl…
> Slackware and LFS are the Haskells of the Linux distribution world.
Haskell is hard. Both Slackware and LFS are simple. I don't see the comparison.
LFS is even better in that it provides a ton of documentation. Slackware unfortunately lost out to the modern world. But heroic effort by Patrick.
Re: Linux from Scratch
#66I wanted to set this up but then the thought of all the useful dbus stuff and device stuff and just all the nicities I take for granted with a mainstream OS … it seemed too daunting and I bailed. I’m 39 still haven’t done it yet and I saw this project maybe 20 years ago or something like that.
Re: Linux from Scratch
#67As 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…
> 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.
There are many ways to do this without RPM too. I used versioned AppDirs. NixOS uses hashed directories names and nix for description of states that are guaranteed to work. No need to have to cater to RPM.
Re: Linux from Scratch
#68I 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 understand it still takes about eight hours. Faster CPUs but busier software cancelled each other out.
> Some things never change
Yeah. Mostly the software stack is now much bigger.
Getting all of LLVM mesa linux cmake ninja glibc gcc binutils xorg KDE to work is more work than in 2005 or 2010. Also GNU configure feels as if nobody maintains it anymore. I still keep libtool around for legacy reasons but I don't like that.
Re: Linux from Scratch
#69Linux 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).
> understood how one would go from here to a modern distro
Well, after LFS you go to BLFS. Compiling KDE isn't that hard if you use scripts that help you. The big problem I see is that a lot of information is missing. People need to know a whole lot. But if you managed to compile it, a simple "startx" should work fine. I even got KDE plasma to work on wayland. Wayland gives me fewer options than xorg though, so I went back to xorg.
Re: Linux from Scratch
#70Is it educational to do this on a VM or should I break out my old thinkpad?
In my opinion having it on a separate computer is easier,
but you can also run this in one or three KDE konsole tabs,
for instance, on an external hdd/sdd.