LFS attempts

JJ Neff jjneff at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 8 09:18:58 EDT 2002


Finally I got around to bringing my oldest computer (K6/2 266 128 Mb Ram) up to
my spare room out of the cold damp basement.  I attached an old off color
monitor, a keyboard that presents "./" everytime I push "/" and a 3 button
serial mouse that you have to lean on the middle button to get it to work and
when it does it takes 2 or 3 clicks as imput!

But what fun, an old 4 Gb SCA SCSI srive and 50 pin adapter with Cdrom was all
I needed.  I partitioned 500Mb for Mandrake 8.2 and did a minimum install, TO
successfully install LFS I needed to manually install all the Development
packages (make etc) and then I needed patch, gpm (to use the mouse to copy
large commands from one console to the next - much easier than typing) 
Anything else I needed I just added the RPM for the cds.  Since I run NIS and
NFS I was able to login fom this very small install and mount my home drive and
copy all the LFS files to the 3.5 Gb partition I had made just for LFS.  From
there it was simply a matter of following the instructions in LFS 3.2.

I was having a blast but sometimes got confused.  I was logged into tty1 as me
reading the LFS3.2 manual in links (love links now that Iknow how to navigate
well), in tty2 as user lfs actually doing the compiling and in tty3 as root to
create any files or change permissions or add packages I may need.  I then
relized I was going to need to chat on irc to get real time help, Hmm what to
do, do I add BitchX or another IRC client to my space strapped mim install when
Iknow its installed on my game machie ENTER SSH, on tty 4 I was ssh'd to my
game machine and using BitchX to chat with other LFS users (a very friendly
bunch of people (not one RTFM the whole time I was there :-)  Man I am learnign
to love the cmd line, I wa able to switch back and forth from literlally
machine to machine without moving form my spot! I also am much more comfortable
with commands like "for x in {a...z}; do mkdir $x; done" or my favorite "for x
in {a...z}; mv $x* $x/; done" THis allowed me to move all the seperate packages
from one directory into individual directories that made them easier to find.

Tonight or later this week I hope to actually start my LFS machine (with all
statically linked software) in the LFS environment and recompile all the
software as dynamic links.  Then hopefully I will know enough to be able to
compile KDE3 (or maybe just cheat and comple a package manager and then use
debs or rpms :-)


If you truly want a feel for what software is actually necessary to make Linux
run (where does ls, chmod, grep, mv, tar etc come from ) theh I highly
recommend setting up an LFS box, but give yourself plenty of free time and keep
a tv or reading material close by as soem packages can take 20 minutes to
compile, in the downtime I tended to switch back to tty1 or 4 and read the docs
or chat online.

Sorry so long but it's a pretty fun experiment and I am excited to have a Linux
Distro that is truly my own... Once I have the base up and running it's totally
up to me what I put on, KDE ,gnome, Light wm ? 

Even if you dont want to or have a spare box, I recommend reading the LFS 3.2
documentation, It is an excellent reference for waht software provides what and
what depends on what...


JJN

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