[wplug] Linux -Build Your Own?

[Duncan Hutty]

www.linuxfromscratch.org is not really a distribution as such for most of its users but an educational exercise.

It is a tutorial more than anything that teaches what are the *required* components for a linux system with a significant amount of information about compilation options for each component.

It *will* make a working linux system if you follow it through and it will make excellent use of your hardware, since you are compiling everything specifically for your machine so you can use -march, etc. options to gcc and other things that can be considered tweaks. The other major benefit that I found is that you know where everything is (/usr/local/bin vs /usr/bin vs /opt etc.) because YOU put it there by hand using --prefix, etc. This I consider to be a major win compared to popular distros. In moving from one distro to another, unexpected locations on the filesystem seem to be a significant problem for me.

To progress to what most people would consider a fully functional gnu/linux system, you will want to use the help at http://beyond.linuxfromscratch.org

I think that gentoo has supplanted the purpose of LFS for creating a customised system, but I have to say that when I used LFS (2.4 it's now at 4.1) I was at my fastest rate of linux learning ever, before or since. If you want to learn, it's fantastic and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If however, you want to build a system that works and allows you to 'get stuff done', then although you can use LFS, you will probably not find that it is the most efficient route to that goal.

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Duncan Hutty