Saturday, November 29, 2008

Linux From Scratch -- Host System

So I have downloaded the minimal LFS LiveCD and popped it into my virtual machine under VMWare Player.

As it is advertised it is definitely a valid host environment for the build process, as checked by version-check.sh

After setting up my main file systems, we need to get the source packages. There is a wget input file in the stable book download directory which comes very handy. My slow internet connection makes me have to wait for all of them to arrive.

Linux From Scratch -- Introduction

I've been a long time casual Linux/Unix user. Back before Ubuntu was hype, I got into Gentoo, but never really got too far beyond installing it and emerging some packages. At my work we use Debian, and on my Vista I sure have Cygwin cause bash and the command line stuff is awesome.

But it always bothered me that I'm not really into Linux. Not into like "I use Ubuntu for my daily browsing and document editing chores" or "I'm the sysadmin of a 50-server heterogeneous *nix farm" but somewhere in between.

I'm pretty much tied to Windows as my main working environment, and can't really afford the hassle to migrate all my stuff to Linux (yeah, going from XP 32-bit to Vista 64-bit was a big enough deal already, thank you), so what do I do?

This is where Linux From Scratch comes into play. I mean. If I just really could build a whole Linux system from scratch, well it would really mean at least something, right?

Well. Jump right into it.

Because I'm a newbie, I start with the latest stable version of the LFS book.

First of all I need a host systems which is a simple 2.6 generic Linux VMware Image created by EasyVMX! and booted up with the LFS LiveCD. Since the latest book version is 6.4 and the latest LiveCD version is 6.3 and I don't need no X and stuff, I'm gonna pick the 32-bit "-min" image.

Since I have a slow internet connection, I guess I will have to hook up on things later.