For those of you who don’t know, Linux From Scratch is a project that teaches you how to compile your own custom distro, with everything compiled from source code.
What was your experience like? Was it easier or harder than you expected? Do you run it as a daily driver or did you just do it for fun?
That is just the gateway drug to bootstrapping.
Check out https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap
if you want the real hard stuff.
I did. First page and said fuck it and left. Don’t have the energy for it. Lol
Did it to learn. Mostly because I had no wifi / internet at home during the time, but did have a burned CD and a book. Was useful, but when I started using Linux as a daily driver I went straight to Ubuntu, and later Fedora
Do recommend for learning and tinkering though.
I ran it as my primary distro on my main machine for a while way back when. I don’t recommend that.
What I do recommend is going though the entire process even if it’s just in a VM. It’s incredibly educational and will teach you a ton about Linux and OS construction in general. I used to recommend it to everyone I was teaching linux/ Unix too and all the students who actually went through it and completed it now have successful IT careers. 100% an incredibly valuable teaching resource, you will look at all OS’s with new eyes after you’ve built one bit by bit from source by hand.
I did a long LONG time ago. I don’t even remember so I’d say 20 years ago. It was very interesting. I do recommend doing it at least once… well maybe only once actually. If possible do it on a real computer, not a VM, so that you don’t get distracted and feel just a bit of risk. Obviously do NOT do it on your main computer where you have important data, just in case.
PS: I do build some things from scratch, including “big” ones like Firefox. I do it because I can prototype with them by modifying just the bits I need. I do like learning how things are made. That being said I don’t think it’s valuable as an entire system, only on a need to do basis. The true benefit IMHO is the learning, not the running system, so no, not at as a daily driver.
Did it for shits and giggles once back in 2006. I think everyone serious about learning Linux at a “pro” level should go through the process at least once, even if the system gets wiped afterward in favor of a more usable distro. Teaches you what the standardized core components are and what they do, and gives you a clear understanding of how Linux is structured. That knowledge will carry on over to other distros and will make it much, much easier to troubleshoot issues with your system if you know how the parts of that system work.
For those unaware or who never used it, it has a huge setup guide with copy/pastable commands to guide you through each step. They don’t just give you a pile of source code and tell you “good luck”.
NCommander did it for a Christmas charity stream a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/live/tCh0XjyIAKU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/live/tCh0XjyIAKU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
kindof, but it was 1993 and I didn’t actually have to compile the kernel but pretty much everything else!
the hardest part was teaching yourself to write slip/ppp dialup scripts with your only resource being a stack of usenet printouts, if you couldn’t get it working you had to reinstall dos and telemate to go back to usenet for more help (only had the one computer!)
telemate was incredible, incidentally, it had an internal editor and file browser so could do multitasking that dos couldn’t, i had it in my autoexec.bat and pretty much used it as my OS because modeming was life.
Slackware blew all that away x 1000 though.
Just open usenet on your phone ffs /s
That was the time before kernel modules, so compiling your own kernel was definitelly required for anything but the most basic setup (no graphics, no audio).
I tried it. Lot of fun and fustration. If You hava spare machine and few weeks to play around, do it. It boosted my knowledge and my skills a lot. I would not use it for daily driver, and never for work.
Documentation is super! If You have to do something by hand, it is one of the best source of info!
By the time I finished, half the system was extremely outdated and probably vulnerable to dozens of RCEs. Somehow I managed to compile KDE, but not Firefox. It always crashed the whole Laptop - 2 GB RAM wasn’t enough.
KDE, Gnome, the kernel, you can compile them without any problems. They’re large and complex but they’re well organized.
X is weird but it can also be compiled fairly easily.
Mozilla stuff is horrendous. There’s no rhyme or reason, it’s hard to find build instructions, half the time they don’t work, when they do the build fails with obscure errors…
All this true and I relate. Firefox is a beast. Compiling browser is a pain. Don’t even tought to do KDE. I put together the ui with some suckless tools and had fun with them. Security, stability are a constant question with a system like this. Not a daily driver, used to gain a deeper knowladge. It is like bivaking behind the grandarents house in the foresst: uncomfortable, adveture, goodway to test Yourself and the gear, still have cookies. Not preparation for the alien zombies in the Amazonas.
Yeah, for me it just showed me how nice a customly installed distro is, and how fast it can be even on an old machine, so it was the first to get Arch installed on. Another Laptop followed, then my main PC, Server and finally the PI.
Haven’t tried LFS yet but I have had my share of compiling custom Arch kernel (basically just making it smaller and boot a little bit faster), or cross-compiling various stuff for embedded and having to crawl through some of the lower level stuff.
It might be that time of a year to give LFS a try now that you mention it.It’s definitely on my Linux bucket list. I’ve been kinda thinking about making a distro myself (specifically because I want to try some unusual and niche things in terms of system layout and package management), and that would be a good starting point.
I’m from a time where there was ONLY compiling from scratch. No package managers either. Can’t say I recommend it.
To be fair there was less to compile, but that still sounds like a lot…
You haven’t lived until you’ve installed Slackware from floppy disks and compiled the necessary network drivers into the kernel by hand. Good times, but never again.
I’m a long time slackware user, but I joined the party some time in 99 or 00.
I never had the pleasure of installing from floppies, but I did compile my own kernels to speed up boot time. Sometimes they would boot, sometimes they wouldn’t. That was part of the fun.
I’ve been on a retro kick lately. I have a pentium 200 mmx based machine that will eventually run a floppy installed slackware. Or at least it will if I can get it to work.
What impressed me at the time was that it worked ; you’d pull huge amount of stuff and then waited in front of a real-life Reversed Matrix full of mysterious hieroglyphs. But Slackware would compile Ardour, Jack, Jamin and whatever else. Yeah it took a while to fetch all the libraries, but then it just did it.
Last week localsend wouldn’t compile on Arch, and took hours to fail it.
I am pretty sure I compiled the kernel once a month back when I had a Pentium 133. Looking back, compiling the kernel must have been a huge chunk of what that machine accomplished.
I did it back in 2020 when we all had nothing better to do. Got as far as installing X11 and Openbox, and halfway through setting up the toolchain for Firefox.
It was fun - the kind of fun digging a big hole is. It’s not for everybody, but I sort of enjoyed it.
I got through some of it then life got busy. It was a good and interesting experiences. I didn’t finish with a fully functional hand crafted artisinal home desktop, though.
I did LFS some years back, but only enough to get to a basic working system. It eventually devolves into doing similar steps to compile each piece of software, which after you’ve compiled a bunch of packages already kind of becomes repetitive. The path of getting there is pretty fun though, it’s a lot of reading and I learned a lot… including that I’d never want to maintain a system like that.
Good learning experience though.
