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LFS - a realistic project?


wakish
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Hello dear mandriva friends..

 

Has anyone of you already tried LFS?

Those who have, could you please try to describe your opinions and experience while doing this..

things you find interesting, things which made you say: "why did i started lfs.."

And any advice/hint?

 

Thanks for your kind attention,

wakish

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I have tried it once, and reached to a point having a usable system with a minimal desktop (some twelve days later, that is).

It was like Gentoo, but with the old installer, and without Emerge.

I wouldn't repeat the experiment, as I do not believe source distros offer any advantages over binary ones. The only gain from it will be that you will surely get some in-depth knowledge of the way Linux is working.

Edited by scarecrow
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It was like Gentoo, but with the old installer, and without Emerge.

So really it's not like gentoo at all? :P :lol2:

 

the thing that makes gentoo gentoo is emerge...otherwise i could say it's like arch without the installer and pacman...or like mandriva without the installer or urpmi/rpm.... :D

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I love gentoo, makes me feel more in control of what I'm doing than a proper installer. Don't think I'm brave enough to try LFS just yet though, if at all. Like most say, why bother if the benefits aren't going to be that great for you. And even more so if it takes you days to get your system up and running.

 

I can get Gentoo ready for server environment in 2 hours or less. Red Hat in about 20 minutes. My time is probably better spent on what I'm doing with the server *after* I've got the OS on it, and not toying with trying to get the OS on it for days :P

 

That said, would be good for the knowledge aspect more than anything else.

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Is there a way to start from an existing distro, make modifications (iconset, menu settings, installed applications, shortcuts, scripts, ...) and then save that as a new 'customized distro' ?

I think the main idea of LFS is the learning experience.

It is really just how to build linux from .. well scratch.. the name is pretty descriptive :D

 

If you wanted to end up with "LFS" from a distro then this is reverse ... what you need to figure out is how to get rid of the package management, config tools and .. well ultimately everything dow to a bootable kernel, compiler and editor...

 

In this case you would probably learn a lot about the distro's package management etc. :D but it would be a hard uphill struggle with no documentation as opposed to a longish fairly flat struggle with lots of documentation which is the LFS experience :D

 

The simpler by far shortcut would be to install gentoo (or perhaps arch which I didn't try) ... the difference is these give you a package management system and hence you can install new packages. As tyme pointed out Gentoo really IS portage.

 

To a slightly lesser extent Mandriva is URPMI....

 

Imagine you have an absolute minimal mandriva install. No X or anything simply a kernel, a shell and the init sequence and a root user.

 

Then you make a new user ... well first you need passwd and pwconv then you create a /home/user dir then you add the user to /etc/passwd etc. then run pwconv to add user to /etc/shadow then you have a user...

 

Then you install basic X ... now if you already have urpmi you just urpmi xorg (or whatever metepackage) but if you don't you download hundreds of packages from fonts to drivers... and find all the deps for them and download those too and eventually you have X and no WM/DM...

 

To be honest I don' think urpmi is capable of this... it kinda assumes certain helper apps are installed .... and was never really designed to be stripped back so far.

 

but

 

This is more or less what a netinstall does for debian. Its an absolute minimal system .. but it has dpkg and apt ... so if you really want you can install the base and apt-get install kde and it will then find all deps (like xorg) and install those too. OR you could install the various components of X seperately configuring as you go.

 

If you avoid metapackages (like xorg) you can install the individual components and not install the whole drivers etc. then you add each and every utility as you like....(a meta package is just a set of packages that are usually used together. )

 

The difference in doing this in LFS and Debian is that Debian has dpkg and hence the configuration of each package can be done via prompting (or you can elect to do it all by hand)

 

There is also a DFS project... which strips this back an extra level ...

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I could never get a 2.6 kernel to work in Debian 3.1. If I installed it, X stopped working when running the 2.6 kernel. But running the 2.4 it worked fine. Bizarre. I'd quite like to get to grips with it (Debian), but something so simple just made me drop it for the time being.

 

Might come back to it later. Sorry about :offtopic:

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and I really don't liek the new gentoo installer

 

Nor me, takes too much control away from me, and installs a genkernel. I'm still using the 2005.1 disk for my gentoo installs. Or at least, until I can get the time to download and use the minimal CD which gives the ability to do the install *just like you used to*.

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