On Mon, Feb 11, 2008 at 11:16:08PM +0100, Steven Locher wrote: > > It is not for admins, but there is a chapter (2 weeks) reserved for > that. My idea is to get the basic system going during those 2 weeks. > > > > You also need to work out how much time > > > is actually available for your course (do you expect your students > > > to devote all their time to the course, or two hours a week, or > > > what ?), and then work out how much of that will be taken up with > > > building the basic system. > > That is exactly what I want to know. Is 2 weeks @ 4h are enough?
Probably not. I build from scripts, and I understand how my scripts work (mostly!), so some of my builds are a straight run-through. On my fastest box, (athlon64 4000+, raptor disk) 4 or 5 hours is ample to get a bootable 32-bit system with gdb, strace, and a few other bells and whistles. The things that really take the time are the toolchain tests, basically all recent toolchains take for ever. Your vmware host is unknown territory for me. Some people have faster machines, I suppose, others are slower. As to looking at the test results, and trying to work out what they are telling you... There's a lot of variability - some packages give you a nice bottom line, like "all 1 tests passed" after running a number of tests, some like 'make' are very easy to understand, some will fail as soon as a test fails (coreutils-6.10), some will silently skip tests in some circumstances. You also have to consider what happens if^H^Hwhen something goes wrong (e.g. students who omit or mis-key something). If you've built the book a few times, and followed the list, you will occasionally have a good idea about what has gone wrong. Other times, people get completely new problems, and I suspect that building on vmware might fall into that category. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
