Feeling rather proud of myself

[Roken]

Because I'm posting this from Firefox on my very own LFS system

Yay Me!

[vrkalak]

Tell us exactly what you did?

How did you go about building a LFS? (that's a Linux From Scratch OS)

Which DE/WM did you use?

How long did it take? So far.

How do you like it?

[tdockery97]

Congratulations. I had thought about trying that. How long did it take? Was it painful?

[Roken]

Well, the first step was a couple of test runs in a VM, and after they booted successfully (to a console that didn't do very much if I'm honest) I moved on to a real life install. This was much like the VMs, except the kernel caused some problems at this stage because it was no longer using drives already mounted, and I had to modify grub manually to get a boot system (well, burg here, but the principle is the same). The build to this point is all done in a chroot from your build system.

Next (still in chroot) I built and configured wpa_supplicant (so that my wireless would work), lynx and wget. This provides enough tools to work in the actual booted LFS system. Next up was xorg - which when started for the first time reminded me somewhat of my very first Linux install some 20 years ago (Debian 3.0 m68k). Of course, xorg by itself isn't much good (though it does build with xterm, xclock and twm so you get a very simplistic desktop).

From there I built xfce in accordance with the instructions at xfce.org, plugging dependancies as I went (there's a lot of deviation from your chosen path as you locate and build required packages).

Finally I had a desktop I could work with, but still using lynx in a terminal (or often two terminals in order to continue with the deviations without losing myself), I built ntfs-3g (so that I could mount my Data drive), alsa and vlc (huge build with many dependancies). This gave me music while I worked

Took a little time out to clean up my system (I had source packages dotted all over, so I consolidated the archives and deleted the extracted folders). Today I've built Firefox 8, Thunderbird 8, a picture viewer, thumbnailer, imagemagick, xchat was yesterday (handy for irc help when something doesn't work). Also had to build esd to get audio with flash working, and a couple of other bits. Some customisation to my theming and I have a working desktop that I could spend all day on (courtesy of vlc I have music, video, live TV, live radio), and FF gives me access to online content (BBC iPlayer etc). Internet radio works just fine with vlc too.

Build time up to now on the live system is around 8 days in total. Practice time before that was about 2 weeks (the first one took 4 days just to boot, but you do get faster). FF and TB caused some problems, and the sources for qt4 (required by vlc) are huge. I'm at the point now where I can concentrate on stuff I actually want on the system. I need truecrypt which is causing some problems because fuse refuses to build, and I want to get an office suite built. After that I'll get back to system stuff, such as gstreamer, mono etc. and then I'm going to have a bash at a completely 64 bit native SecondLife viewer (I run an OSGrid sim, and the new viewers will allow collada meshes to be used - though I haven't found a single viewer that will do both mesh and audio on Linux 64)

Then I may think about apt - because I can see the constant maintenance getting tiresome

I should add, the sense of achievement when that first boot completes is immense, and it stays high with xorg, then a DE. I consider FF and TB to be high points as well, especially as many LFS builders heartily recommended not building from source. Up to now, the only thing I didn't build was the single libflashplayer.so library, since it's propriety source code isn't available. I can live with that

[minty33]

I also have the LFS page bookmarked in firefox and for some time have been wanting to give it a go. Was it worth it from an educational standpoint. I was hoping to learn more about linux's inner workings and the kernal. Is that a good way to do so or is LFS more just about getting a more custom software environment .

by the way I have a good book called "live linux cd's -building and customizing bootables" by Christopher Negus published in 2007 - Prentice Hall/Pearson Education publishers - its about remastering and building your own custom live distro. It is pretty cool. It's a couple years old now but I recommend it. the book Covers unionfs , squashfs and cloop drivers among other things not just distro specific build tools.

[Matti L]

Have you thought of a name for your own distro yet?

[Anakinholland]

/salute

It's on my todo-list indeed, but I don't think I could pull it off just yet...

[soccerz619]

Congratulations! I shouldn't have read this post though... now I'm probably going to have to do this myself.