On Tuesday 08 June 2010 16:54:52 Mike McCarty wrote: > piper.guy1 wrote: > > One more thing. Seeing that this is a very risky thing to be advising > > in LFS 6.6, can I suggest that the authour(s) add some caveats around > > this instruction?
The best way to do LFS is to pretend you are the computer, executing each command and understanding what each command does. In short time, you'll come to recognize what is happening and learn to pause before you hit the <ENTER> key. Been there, done that. Hmmm. May I produce a t-shirt that proclaims, "Member of the 'I hosed my Linux system building LFS!' club" ?? > > Besides, porking your main machine to the point where it won't > boot, and figuring out how to get it back is half the fun, isn't > it? :-) It's fun the first couple times. :) Then it just becomes tedious and a pain to figure out how to avoid it in the future. :D In a way, LFS is instructionary (as intended). If you do *exactly* what the book says, the probability is high that you will succeed and not hose your host system. I started playing with UNIX in 1986, and Linux in the mid-nineties. And just a couple weeks ago, I overwrote a disk that contained half of a couple striped MD filesystems. Lost nearly 10 years of pics and history. Another time, while redesigning the Smoothwall build system, I overwrote large bits of my host system because the build system did what I *told* it to do, not what I *wanted* it to do. Sigh. I *meant* to copy an external drive's image to a partition, *not* the whole drive. So if all you did was wipe out a link to a shell, you haven't tried hard enough. :) Almost any Linux distro that has a rescue mode (even Debian's netinstall CD will work, and its much quicker) will allow you to boot into a usable Linux and repair such minor damage. - boot the live or rescue system - don't use your host's FS as root - mount your host's root FS and/or /usr FS, as needed - find what you hosed and any alternatives - create a symlink from that which you lost to an alternative For example, if you deleted the symlink to dash, you can create a new link to dash. If you wiped out dash itself, you can create a symlink to just about anything that will act as a shell. Tclsh would do in a pinch; even perl or php would work. At the worst, you might have to find and download the bash/dash/csh/tcsh package, learn to unarchive it, and replace only what you deleted. You could get lucky and find the package cached in a package archive area, as you'd find in at least Debian or Ubuntu (an ancient African word meaning "can't install Debian"). And, yes, I have done 'rm -rf *' when in the root directory on my old AT&T UNIXPC. I've since learned to be more careful. But, clearly, not careful enough. :) Just remember, it's only a computer. It can be restored to proper operating condition. In time, you'll learn to keep your personal data on a separate filesystem. You'll learn to pause before hitting <ENTER>. And in time you'll wonder why you stuck with Winders or Mac so long. '97-02, I used BeOS as my primary system. For a short time, I used Windows after, until Debian Etch was release. I've been using Linux as my primary system ever since. As Mike says, LFS is not for newbies. Though I might allow that it is not for newbies who have only one computer. Keep a computer, any computer, handy for internet access to search for the mistakes you make and how others have recovered. At least technically, we humans learn from our mistakes and are usually willing to help teach others to avoid and/or recover from theirs. Often you'll get a respone that details how to recover. Other times, you get a response like, "There, there. This, too, shall pass." So welcome to the world of virtual reality, where the all that exists are meaningless bits. It is all virtual; none of it is tangible. It is there to be moulded to our own individual desires. In the future, pay close attention to *each* step of LFS. And be sure to follow each step *exactly*. [Fest3er steps off his soapbox and puts it away.] A possible future enhancement to 'the book' might be to incorporate checkboxes that a newbie would check off as she performs each step. Extra work? Yes. But worth it to make each step clearer? Yes again. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
