For those of you who don’t know, Linux From Scratch is a project that teaches you how to compile your own custom distro, with everything compiled from source code.
What was your experience like? Was it easier or harder than you expected? Do you run it as a daily driver or did you just do it for fun?
I did LFS some years back, but only enough to get to a basic working system. It eventually devolves into doing similar steps to compile each piece of software, which after you’ve compiled a bunch of packages already kind of becomes repetitive. The path of getting there is pretty fun though, it’s a lot of reading and I learned a lot… including that I’d never want to maintain a system like that.
Good learning experience though.
It’s definitely on my Linux bucket list. I’ve been kinda thinking about making a distro myself (specifically because I want to try some unusual and niche things in terms of system layout and package management), and that would be a good starting point.
I did. First page and said fuck it and left. Don’t have the energy for it. Lol
I did it back in 2020 when we all had nothing better to do. Got as far as installing X11 and Openbox, and halfway through setting up the toolchain for Firefox.
It was fun - the kind of fun digging a big hole is. It’s not for everybody, but I sort of enjoyed it.
I did a long LONG time ago. I don’t even remember so I’d say 20 years ago. It was very interesting. I do recommend doing it at least once… well maybe only once actually. If possible do it on a real computer, not a VM, so that you don’t get distracted and feel just a bit of risk. Obviously do NOT do it on your main computer where you have important data, just in case.
PS: I do build some things from scratch, including “big” ones like Firefox. I do it because I can prototype with them by modifying just the bits I need. I do like learning how things are made. That being said I don’t think it’s valuable as an entire system, only on a need to do basis. The true benefit IMHO is the learning, not the running system, so no, not at as a daily driver.
I ran it as my primary distro on my main machine for a while way back when. I don’t recommend that.
What I do recommend is going though the entire process even if it’s just in a VM. It’s incredibly educational and will teach you a ton about Linux and OS construction in general. I used to recommend it to everyone I was teaching linux/ Unix too and all the students who actually went through it and completed it now have successful IT careers. 100% an incredibly valuable teaching resource, you will look at all OS’s with new eyes after you’ve built one bit by bit from source by hand.
That is just the gateway drug to bootstrapping.
Check out https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap
if you want the real hard stuff.
I’m from a time where there was ONLY compiling from scratch. No package managers either. Can’t say I recommend it.
You haven’t lived until you’ve installed Slackware from floppy disks and compiled the necessary network drivers into the kernel by hand. Good times, but never again.
What impressed me at the time was that it worked ; you’d pull huge amount of stuff and then waited in front of a real-life Reversed Matrix full of mysterious hieroglyphs. But Slackware would compile Ardour, Jack, Jamin and whatever else. Yeah it took a while to fetch all the libraries, but then it just did it.
Last week localsend wouldn’t compile on Arch, and took hours to fail it.
I’m a long time slackware user, but I joined the party some time in 99 or 00.
I never had the pleasure of installing from floppies, but I did compile my own kernels to speed up boot time. Sometimes they would boot, sometimes they wouldn’t. That was part of the fun.
I’ve been on a retro kick lately. I have a pentium 200 mmx based machine that will eventually run a floppy installed slackware. Or at least it will if I can get it to work.
I am pretty sure I compiled the kernel once a month back when I had a Pentium 133. Looking back, compiling the kernel must have been a huge chunk of what that machine accomplished.
To be fair there was less to compile, but that still sounds like a lot…
I got through some of it then life got busy. It was a good and interesting experiences. I didn’t finish with a fully functional hand crafted artisinal home desktop, though.
The consensus seems to be: go for it for the learning experience.
I would agree. It’s useful to know all the parts of a GNU/Linux system fit together. But the maintenance can be quite heavy in terms of security updates. So I’d advise to do it as a project, but not to actually make real use of unless you want to dedicate time going forwards to it.
For a compiled useful experience gentoo handles updates and doing all the work for you.
Gentoo’s USE flags are fuckin’ amazing.
Did it to learn. Mostly because I had no wifi / internet at home during the time, but did have a burned CD and a book. Was useful, but when I started using Linux as a daily driver I went straight to Ubuntu, and later Fedora
Do recommend for learning and tinkering though.
Has anyone here ever tried punching themselves in the dick repeatedly?
Yes, I tried installing arch before.
I did it during the gcc 3 transition. I used a very new gcc 3 (maybe even pre-release), which wasn’t at all recommended. A couple of (most?) C++ packages didn’t compile (some change having to do with namespace scope), which meant I had to fix the source of some packages (generally pretty trivial changes, usually having to prepend
namespace::to identifiers). Overall this problem was pretty rare, like it affected less than 1% of C++ files, but with things like Qt or Phoenix (or whatever Firefox was called back then), with thousands of files, I had to fix dozens of things. I guess running into problems made it more interesting and fun actually.Did I learn anything? The main thing I learned is about all the different basic packages and what sort of binaries and libraries are included in them and why you need them. Also about some import config files in
/etc. And a bit of shell experience, but I dare say I knew most of that stuff already. How much you learn depends a lot on how much you already know.Overall what I learned was not very deep knowledge, nor was it a very time-efficient way to learn. But it was a chill learning experience, goal-oriented and motivating. And it made me more comfortable and confident in my ability to figure out and fix stuff.
Also it’s obviously not practical to keep that up to date, so I switched back to a distro after a couple of months of this.
I found it was useful for learning bits and pieces of the extra knowledge around working on a Linux system. Yeah, you’re not going to learn how a kernel works or how anything about data structures. But you will learn how to apply a patch, be exposed to a lot of work with the shell, and come to appreciate the work that goes into a modern distro.
kindof, but it was 1993 and I didn’t actually have to compile the kernel but pretty much everything else!
the hardest part was teaching yourself to write slip/ppp dialup scripts with your only resource being a stack of usenet printouts, if you couldn’t get it working you had to reinstall dos and telemate to go back to usenet for more help (only had the one computer!)
telemate was incredible, incidentally, it had an internal editor and file browser so could do multitasking that dos couldn’t, i had it in my autoexec.bat and pretty much used it as my OS because modeming was life.
Slackware blew all that away x 1000 though.
That was the time before kernel modules, so compiling your own kernel was definitelly required for anything but the most basic setup (no graphics, no audio).
Just open usenet on your phone ffs /s
Yes, back in the early 00s. We toyed with making a net-bootable image with it for our computer labs, but it was really not practical. It definitely taught me a ton about systems, though.
