Linux From Scratch

Tue 07 October 2003
By John Mark Schofield in Technology
Tagged as: Linux

I got interested in a project called Linux From Scratch (LFS) about a year ago, going so far as to have a copy place print out the 4.0 version of the book. Never really did anything about it, though. This weekend I started working on the 4.1 version, working on the website while I waited for stuff to compile. It's pretty cool. The best way analogy I've found is automobiles; building a Linux From Scratch system is like building a car from parts. I'm compiling from source every single file that's needed for the system, I'm writing configuration files (or at least, I will be) -- in short, I'm putting the entirety of the operating system together.

I'm still in the compiling things in static mode stage -- meaning that there's a whole lot more work to do. I've only run into a couple of problems the book didn't prepare me for. The book said to use cfdisk to partition the hard drive for the LFS installation; cfdisk isn't installed in Red Hat 8. I tracked down an RPM to install it, and got it to work but couldn't figure out how to use it, at least well. (It required you to input partition sizes in a way that required that you know exactly what you want to do before you do it. Since I was making stuff up as I went along, I ran into trouble.) I tried fdisk (I've used the same-named but different MS-DOS version of this program many times) and I was able to figure it out without trouble. The next problem was that two libraries I needed, libcurses.a and libncurses.a, were not present. I had to track down the right version of the development version of the package, but I did and got it to work. Two steps forward; one step back. That's teaching yourself Linux. I'll keep you posted as the project progresses.