FRESH

Hacker News

Home

Linux from Scratch

375 points by Alupis

by necovek

5 subcomments

This was probably the best thing I've done to learn the ins and outs of a running Linux system: I think it would be amazing to re-do it with a modern Linux stack (systemd + Wayland), but it can really remove all the "magic" from the full OS implementation for you.
However, I've done it in 1999 and ran that system until 2001 when it became too much of a trouble to recompile everything and battle dependencies manually — note that LFS was not as detailed then either, so many dependencies you had to track yourself, and some were very obscure!
Yes, the time investment was high, but I was a high school student starting college with too much interest in something like this and obviously enough time on my hands (after which I was so "smart" to switch to Slackware, a one-man show where I also ended up having manually compiled versions of "small packages" like XFree86 and GNOME, which I was contributing to: when "GARNOME" showed up, that was a revelation! etc)
So if you can afford it, do it: using Linux will never be the same again!

by charliebwrites

2 subcomments

Every time I see this, I upvote it
I’m sure it’s different than it was when I was a teenager but building Linux from scratch was the thing that got me into computers as a kid
It shows that computers can be accessible _and modifiable_ at the lowest levels

by steve1977

2 subcomments

It's been years since I went through this, but whenever someone asks me what they should read to get a deeper understanding of what a Linux distribution is, I point them to this.

by BeetleB

2 subcomments

From "20 Years of Gentoo" (https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/):

    "Even more common: “Oh, I’m not going to use Gentoo. I want to go all the way and use LFS!”

    They never heed my warnings about it. Every one of them either quits in the middle of the install, or soon after, and swears off source based distributions for life.

    Slackware and LFS are the Haskells of the Linux distribution world. People jump to the extreme end of the spectrum, and either get burnt or remain unproductive for life, when they should have just used OCaml or F# instead."

by petcat

0 subcomment

I bought the dead tree version of this book back in ~2006 or so.
I used to work in a business park in Seattle and the company next door to us operated a PC recycling warehouse. There were piles of old 386/486-era PCs in various states of disrepair just piled up behind their building. I'd go out there once in awhile and pick-through their piles looking for Intel CPUs, sticks of RAM, and hard drives. Find a good chassis with intact motherboard.
I loved putting that stuff together and installing Linux on those machines. I cut my teeth on Linux and LFS building computers out of those Frankensteins.

by kanbankaren

4 subcomments

As someone who has been using Linux as a daily driver for 25+ years and also used linuxfromscratch.org for building some packages, I would say, don't waste you time building from scratch. There is very little utility unless you are maintaining some arcane system professionally.
Stick to RPM based systems as dnf supports transactions. The ability to look at history of package installation and rollback to a known state solves most admin issues.

by oumua_don17

0 subcomment

Quite a few comments refer to BLFS which is Beyond Linux from scratch https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/stable-systemd/in...

by Alupis

0 subcomment

I completed my Cross-Linux From Scratch distro in 2014, targeting the original Raspberry Pi since I was frustrated with the lack of (at the time) minimalist distros.
It was extra-hard, due to the cross-compiling nature of targeting the ARMv6 cpu family - but I learned a massive amount along the way.
Even though CentOS-minimal was released for Raspberry Pi by time I completed the project, I had so much fun it didn't matter. I ended up making a custom build system, consisting of a hodgepodge of bash scripts all wrapped together with a Makefile. My self-hosted Jenkins build server (old mini computer shoved on my book case) would run builds and produce the image artifact - those were the days...
The final distro image was ~40MB, which was impressive to me on it's own.

by MartijnBraam

0 subcomment

Linux from scratch is quite a lot of fun, did it a decade ago and learned how to bootstrap a linux system after installing Archlinux got boring. Never went past the initial "get a working" system stage though.
Now I'm building LFS/BLFS again but hacked the Alpine package manager into it to actually be able to install multiple machines with this and crossed the point where I'm daily driving it on my laptop

by yread

1 subcomments

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter08/g...
> the test suite for Glibc is considered critical. Do not skip it under any circumstance.
> Generally a few tests do not pass. The test failures listed below are usually safe to ignore.
I felt a bit uneasy writing something similar into my software e2e test suite, but hey if glibc can do it, why not!
> It's imperative to strictly follow these steps above unless you completely understand what you are doing. Any unexpected deviation may render the system completely unusable. YOU ARE WARNED.
Is this the Dark Souls of linux distros?

by shevy-java

0 subcomment

LFS/BLFS is great. I am not saying all of it is perfect; some parts could and should be more extensive. I am having issues with compiling a new kernel from scratch (so many options ... what do I need) and some options related to video cards and what not. But by and large, this is an example of what makes linux great: knowledge and application of knowledge. You rarely see this in other operating systems - definitely not windows really but also mostly not in other operating systems. Anyone knows the BSD version of LFS? Well ...

by edu_do_cerrado

0 subcomment

Had to go through it 4 times to reach a stable distro, I learned so much doing it

by Akronymus

0 subcomment

There's a quite fun, related, series about doing "Linux from nothing" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkoRSCZZILDO-YU9Ct-Ke...
Sadly only 4 videos so far.

by nickjj

0 subcomment

I haven't gone through this but now I really want to.
Moved to native Linux on the desktop a few weeks ago after 15+ years of using Linux on the server and spending a majority of my time in WSL in Windows for the last decade.
I've learned so many new things in this short period of time. Tracing down memory leaks with GPU processes, misbehaving GPU drivers, power saving modes, etc..

by Rauchg

0 subcomment

This was a pivotal project for me as a young lad learning Linux and software engineering back in the day. Can't recommend it enough. So many little frustrations and painpoints to overcome, wasn't easy , and shows you the ropes of what's to come.

by pizlonator

1 subcomments

This is such an awesome project.
I had a lot of fun doing LFS plus a bit of BLFS and then I adapted it to my memory safe linux project https://fil-c.org/pizlix

by cbdevidal

2 subcomments

I did this in 2001 on a 200MHz Pentium with 128MB RAM. Took about eight hours. Great experience.
I understand it still takes about eight hours. Faster CPUs but busier software cancelled each other out.
Some things never change.

by drnick1

0 subcomment

This and "Ray tracing in one week-end" are HN classics that I wish I had completed long ago.

by neptunicmess

1 subcomments

Linux from Scratch is great for building a deeper understanding of how the different parts in linux systems work together at their foundation. Working through it also made me appreciate what distributions and package managers actually provide to me even more. However, i do often read people stating it helped them to "understand linux". Not sure what that means to be frank. Because you do not learn much about actually doing things with or on linux. You learn, essentially, how to knock together a linux system from the various components, the core part being, setting up a compiler (if i remember correctly, you rebuild gcc three times in the process to get an "untainted" compiler), i.e. build something like a distro pre-cursor if you will. These are great skills to have, but also very specific ones. They aren't helping you much in your day to day use of linux. I think everyone serious about linux should do LFS at least once in their career (and, contrary to some popular statements, you actually can do it quite early on, if you can read and follow a manual), just maybe don't have false expectations about what it will actually be teaching you.

by macrocosmos

3 subcomments

Is it educational to do this on a VM or should I break out my old thinkpad?

by Blackstrat

0 subcomment

Just finished LFS a week ago. Great project.

by self_awareness

1 subcomments

Years ago, installing Gentoo from an early stage was also a good experiment.
Nowadays they've deprecated all stages but stage3. It's still fun, but bootstrapping Gentoo from stage1 was a Linux-from-scratch-like experience (not quite, but similar).

by lfsss

1 subcomments

In the next part, I hope I can write a kernel from scratch, haha.

by lfsss

0 subcomment

One of the most incredible computer experiences.

0 subcomment

by gigatexal

0 subcomment

I wanted to set this up but then the thought of all the useful dbus stuff and device stuff and just all the nicities I take for granted with a mainstream OS … it seemed too daunting and I bailed. I’m 39 still haven’t done it yet and I saw this project maybe 20 years ago or something like that.

by dang

0 subcomment

Related. Others?
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41747966 - Oct 2024 (159 comments)
Beyond Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39547118 - Feb 2024 (17 comments)
Linux from Scratch Version 12.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37648808 - Sept 2023 (28 comments)
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33734685 - Nov 2022 (9 comments)
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30496018 - Feb 2022 (96 comments)
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29949311 - Jan 2022 (9 comments)
Linux from Scratch with Training Wheels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28820602 - Oct 2021 (41 comments)
Linux from Scratch 10.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24350738 - Sept 2020 (49 comments)
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238015 - Aug 2020 (86 comments)
Major Proposed Changes to Linux From Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23787526 - July 2020 (93 comments)
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20168343 - June 2019 (15 comments)
Ask HN: Is the Linux From Scratch project still relevant? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20149111 - June 2019 (7 comments)
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16823110 - April 2018 (1 comment)
Linux from Scratch Version 8.2 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510333 - March 2018 (2 comments)
Linux from Scratch – build your own Linux distro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829373 - June 2016 (57 comments)
Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392057 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)
Welcome to Linux From Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488162 - Sept 2012 (71 comments)
Linux From Scratch 7.1 Published - 3.2.6 Kernel + GCC 4.6.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3677350 - March 2012 (13 comments)
Linux From Scratch 7 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3171448 - Oct 2011 (27 comments)
Ask HN: Linux from Scratch.. Should I try it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779665 - Oct 2010 (58 comments)
How to build custom Linux from source code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743843 - Aug 2009 (1 comment)

by awesome_dude

0 subcomment

I too did this, around 2003/4
It was during my great "Try all the Linux" period, and I had trouble with it compiling on my slackware system, but it compiled just fine on my red hat system (before RHEL)
It was a toy for me, I built it just to see if I could, built it a few times, but was running red hat or slackware as my daily driver.
During that period I also tried the BSDs, Free, Dragonfly, Net, and Open
It was so much fun getting the hang of how each OS differed, the nuances, the ins and outs.
(FTR, I switched to Ubuntu late 2005, and haven't moved since - apt is/was the best thing since recycled electrons)

by theideaofcoffee

0 subcomment

So many good memories I had running through this way back when and it gave such a good and deep look into how a fully functioning system worked. It removed a lot of the mystery of this distro vs that distro and how all the pieces fit together. I still use some of the knowledge I gained from this in my day-to-day work, some of which is sorely lacking by others doing seemingly the same job as me.
I remember going through this and there was a point where you were running a stock, generic kernel before having built a specialized kernel with modules and options you wanted. I apparently ran up against thermal limits on this laptop because power management was one of the options for you to configure. I had to zoom through that section with a box fan pointed at that laptop so I could get power management and throttling to work so it wouldn't randomly shut down. Good times.
I used the same laptop I went through the first time with the same LFS install for a number of years after that until my day job killed my interest in doing this stuff in my free time. I switched to Debian after that and never looked back.
Like others are saying, I always recommend going through this for those that want a deeper understanding of linux, the kernel, and all its accoutrements.

by GuinansEyebrows

1 subcomments

for as long as i've been running and tinkering with linux, i really need to run this marathon before i get much older. i don't think it'll happen til i quit my job and have more time to actually enjoy using my computer :(

by LePetitPrince

0 subcomment

[dead]

by webdevver

5 subcomments

Making bespoke linux distros should be quite a good fit for LLM agents, especially given the recent results with the LLM-authored web browser.