On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 23:31, Shawn wrote: > I'd be interested to see a presentation on LFS. Is it possible to go > through an LFS install in a short period? (say 30 - 45 minutes?) If not, > then I would humbly suggest this type of presentation might be better suited > for one of the monthly meetings - but by all means, it'd be great to hear > more about it at the installfest.
Well. Given an actual presentation eh? I make a horrible public speaker. I've tried before, and given up on it. But I suppose I could give it another try under a more casual atmosphere. I won't be able to demonstrate an LFS installation in 45 minutes. I can start one but won't get very far. Building an entire Linux system from source takes a very long time, depending on CPU speed. On my 1.8 Ghz notebook a base LFS installation unattended takes 5 hours. To do it manually, quite a bit more. But the ideas behind LFS are easily explained. I'll give it more thought. I'll attend almost guaranteed, and see what I can do LFS wise. > On a personal note, it's no secret I currently favor Gentoo, but I've been > giving some thought to trying out LFS on my other computer to at least get a > little familiar with it... There's nothing wrong with Gentoo. Both yield a similar end product, but with one very profound difference: Gentoo does all the work for you. LFS makes you do it all yourself. The difference is from an educational point of view. LFS isn't a distribution and we'll never be done. We're here to teach how a Linux system fits together, what depends on what, and so forth. Every distribution has its own ideas, idiosynchrosies, philosophies, and so forth. LFS has none of that. Finish the book and you have installed a basic set of Linux apps, leaning a tad more to development tools (that you'll need to build whatever else you want to have). From what people tell me, LFS helps them learn Linux in general better, not Linux as a distribution decided to install something. Let me spearhead this question: isn't maintaining such a system slow, tedious and extremly labour intensive? Yes, yes and yes again. If you do it all manually that is. Building from source takes more time than unpacking a pre-compiled package. Knowing how to build it takes time on your part to learn...get to know the package. But after you've done it all a first time, there's ALFS - Automated LFS which can help here. It still takes time (there's just nothing you can do about the time needed to compile large packages like OpenOffice, KDE and Mozilla) but not very many man-hours. But it's doable, and the pay-off is good (in my humble opinion). Oh why not, one more shameless promotion: here's an article I wrote for OSDN on what some of the benefits are for compiling software from source. The Gentoo folks will already know this: -- Gerard Beekmans http://www.linuxfromscratch.org http://www.beekmansworld.com // Linux Consultant --- OSDN / DevChannel // If Linux doesn't have the solution, you have the wrong problem
