On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 01:29:58PM -0400, Wally Lepore wrote: > > I've been reading and studying much and definitely look for as much > support as possible with the chosen distro. I've been involved with > computers for a long long time. I just started studying Linux about > two months ago. I still haven't loaded a distro yet and I am simply > looking for a host distro that will give me the least conflict with > building an LFS distro. >
LFS is arguably not a distro. I don't want to get into splitting hairs, the thing is that a completed LFS system is only really ready for you to start building the packages you want to use. If you haven't used a current linux system, identifying a first set of useful packages (I'm assuming this is going to be some sort of desktop) will be unnecessarily hard. Start with a distro, explore what they offer, decide which packages you think you want to use. As long as you leave space (i.e. partitions) available for future systems [ you might even try more than one distro, although persuading them that they don't own /boot can be *fun* ], and arguably put both /boot and /home on partitions of their own, then you can keep using the host distro while you build LFS, and if you eventually make a permanent move to using LFS then you can remove the other distro to make space for your *next* LFS system. On big modern disks, there is plenty of space to install several systems - keep all the *data* in /home. After you have become comfortable with using a distro, perhaps try building a newer kernel to suit your machine [ ideally, without an initrd, so that you have a .config that you can use in LFS ] and take a look at BLFS - try to install some of the packages in it (you will need to remember that any dependency in LFS itself, such as gawk, is never listed as a dependency in BLFS) : if you install packages in /usr/local, or /opt, then they should be out of the way of the distro's package management tools. > > I simply prefer to learn Linux from the ground up, as in the correct > way without the help of fancy admin tools. I prefer to learn how to > load, compile and build my own packages and NOT have a particular > distro's admin tools automatically accomplish this for me. I'd like to > know what's happening behind the admin tools actions. > Ah, terminology. When you say 'load' I think of what happens when I execute one of the programs from a package and the system loads it. LFS won't teach you much about the details of that. 'Compile' and 'build' are mostly synonyms for us : Usually, packages are CMMI - configure, make, make install. A few use cmake [ something I try to avoid ] - for linux users, it's just an alternative to 'configure' (you still have to run 'make' afterwards), but with its own arcane variables. On other OS's cmake does things differently. Come back when you are comfortable with how to install packages and know what you want to do with the resulting LFS system - that might mean that it is only a place to learn more about how the parts fit together, and that you will stay with your host distro for doing real work. 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
