Thursday 1 May 2008

Linux From Scratch

I first started experimenting with Linux in February 2007, and tried loads of distros before eventually settling on Kubuntu. Although I was using Kubuntu Edgy for about a month, I wasn't able to connect to the Internet, either wirelessly or by Ethernet until I switched to Feisty the day that was released, so I take the launch date of Feisty as the date I started using Linux as my main operating system.

So, now that I've switched to Hardy, I've been using Linux for a little over a year now. In that time, I've learned a lot. Thanks to my experimentation with VirtualBox, I've been able to try more distros than I care to name, and I'm confident that I could easily use a more complex distro such as Debian, having tried Etch in VirtualBox and liked it. I have tried Gentoo, but that won't boot in VirtualBox for some reason - anyone know why? Slackware was good as well, but I struggled a little with it.

But for a while I've had a hankering to try something else:
Linux From Scratch. For the uninitiated, LFS is essentially a project that describes how to build your own custom GNU/Linux system from scratch. It can be done from an existing system, the Linux From Scratch live CD (which includes the software and manuals you need), or another live CD such as Knoppix. It sounds pretty cool, and I've heard that you can learn an awful lot from making your own custom install.

Has anyone else done this before? Was it hard? And do you think that after 1 year, it's likely that I've got enough Linux experience to do it? I'd love to hear from you if you have created your own custom system in this fashion.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This post looks so lonely without any comments...

I don't have any experience with LFS, but I am about to try it out. What was your experience with it if you ended up going through with it?

MattBD said...

I didn't, I'm afraid. But, that said, I'm now thinking of migrating my old Dell Inspiron from Kubuntu to something lighter (KDE4's just too heavy for it) and LFS is one of the possible candidates to replace it, alongside Slackware, FreeBSD, Gentoo and Arch.