Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Welcome to Linux From Scratch

linuxfromscratch.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–75 of 75 posts

Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch

#71

Post by arafalov »

thmzlt wrote: post #31
arafalov wrote: post #29

Looks interesting if niche. Somebody should take all the documentation and create gamification experience around it. With levels and all. Maybe even as a submission to the currently running Gamification Coursera class.... I can just imagine: Level one: you managed to download all sources. All the way to "You are the master, you can now serve your own ??? (ruby on rails app?) from your own server". Then build a commun…

Does anyone older than 14 really care about that?

Zynga made vast majority of its money from the people significantly older than 14. And they swear by gamification.

Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch

#72

Post by nitrogen »

stinos wrote: post #36
nitrogen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd probably take about a week for a noob to get a reasonable desktop up and running with LFS or Gentoo, but that week will be some of the most valuable education about software build processes and operating system design one can find.

I beg to differ. I don't recall how long it took me exactly, but the only thing I learnt about build processes was, both on LFS and Gentoo: if it fails to compile, lookup on google what to do and apply that. If all else fails, edit the code and hope it does not cause a waterfall effct.And I even cared about learning. If you just follow the manual you'll have learned nothing at all.

That is exactly the kind of experience that forces one to understand the interactions of complex systems and learn how to debug them.

Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch

#74

Post by albertzeyer »

fusiongyro wrote: post #70
albertzeyer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you learn in LFS that you don't learn in Gentoo? I have started with Gentoo several years ago (and never tried LFS) but I really learned a lot how Linux works. In Gentoo, you can basically do everything. You are just supported in that by a really nice package manager. But you are starting from scratch. You are bootstrapping the system, setting up compiler flags, setting up build flags and decide about every s…

Right, and then Portage makes everything and puts it into place. And then you use Gentoo's init scripts. And then you use Gentoo's package manager. And so forth. What you learn is exactly what it is that the distribution does, which parts of the system are decided by it, which things are convention and which things are configuration. Gentoo's great, I ran it for several years, but I'm still glad I did LFS one semeste…

But nothing is really decided on Gentoo. You can easily use another init-system for example (all the common ones are in Portage). You can also use a different package manager. I recall that there was a famous replacement for emerge; forgot its name right now.

Otherwise, I don't see much difference between

    ./configure
    make install
and

    emerge x
Except that in the first case, you have to deal with some exceptions where it doesn't work that way. But not sure if that knowledge is really valuable.

Re: Welcome to Linux From Scratch

#75

Post by fusiongyro »

albertzeyer wrote: post #74
fusiongyro wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and then Portage makes everything and puts it into place. And then you use Gentoo's init scripts. And then you use Gentoo's package manager. And so forth. What you learn is exactly what it is that the distribution does, which parts of the system are decided by it, which things are convention and which things are configuration. Gentoo's great, I ran it for several years, but I'm still glad I did LFS one semeste…

But nothing is really decided on Gentoo. You can easily use another init-system for example (all the common ones are in Portage). You can also use a different package manager. I recall that there was a famous replacement for emerge; forgot its name right now. Otherwise, I don't see much difference between ./configure make install and emerge x Except that in the first case, you have to deal with some exceptions where…

I think you should give it a shot yourself and then come back and let us all know what you learned and whether it's meaningful.
Post reply on HN