[HN Gopher] Linux from Scratch with Training Wheels
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Linux from Scratch with Training Wheels
Author : pthyme
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-10-10 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (philsyme.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (philsyme.github.io)
| peakaboo wrote:
| This is great if you are a teenager. I used to do stuff like this
| all the time.
|
| But as an adult.. It's just not worth the time.
| petschge wrote:
| This isn't (or shouldn't) be an age thing. It is a 'stage of
| learning" thing.
|
| If you are new to Linux (or even all Unices) and you want to
| get a firm understanding of the fundamentals, it may very well
| be worth while to go through it at least once and see all the
| moving parts. And see them in an order that makes their
| dependencies clear(er).
|
| Once you know all that and just want to keep up with the
| constant churn of versions to keep that one webserver running
| and recent? Yeah. Not worth it. Get some distro that matches
| your preferred characteristics and stop worrying if you need to
| update libBLA to recompile Apache to fix the path traversal
| vulnerability. That also removes the question if that library
| still compiles correctly with gcc 7 or if you need to upgrade
| to at least gcc 9...
|
| Edit: Doing it in a VM first, might help in getting the 99
| percent working first linux installation into a usable shape to
| make it a good daily driver. In that sense it helps lowering
| the barrier to actually switching later on.
| elteto wrote:
| Yes, adults should not experiment with building custom
| distros... as we all know all existing Linux distributions were
| built by teenagers.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| My company is looking for someone to build a linux system for a
| specialized tablet PC, with, among other things, a custom
| kernel and OTA updates.
|
| If you built a linux system from scratch, this will put you in
| a very good position to get the job.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sanirank wrote:
| I don't know why but I find this so interesting. I totally don't
| have time right now (with a young kid and trying to make some/any
| progress in my career as a dev now that I've successfully made
| the career change to working as a developer), but I really just
| like understanding how things work from the ground up - I can't
| wait to have the time to build my own Linux distribution. It
| feels like it'll be such a waste of time - like installing 5 or 6
| different distros on an old PC I had just out of curiosity to see
| what they looked snd felt like. And I broke and fixed the boot
| loader so many times that it became kind of an enjoyable
| challenge getting the machine to work again - "ok, now how did I
| get grub2 to recognise where my partitions are...?" It seemed
| like spinning my wheels but I just really enjoyed it. I don't
| know why. Kind of reminds me of a comment someone made here on HN
| about Linux a while ago - something to the effect of "I want an
| OS I do t want a hobby." Except I enjoy messing around with it
| and spending time making it work. Not very productive though I
| admit.
| badocr wrote:
| I remember some ~20 years ago, only going thru their HOWTO was
| very revealing about the system innards and I remember having a
| blast. I never went trough a real LFS install because I lacked
| an extra box at the time, but it is something the lingered on
| the back of my head since.
| userbinator wrote:
| I tried LFS a long time ago, and frankly I don't consider it
| much of an educational experience --- downloading, compiling,
| and installing a bunch of stuff repeatedly with small
| variations of the same commands just doesn't make you learn
| much.
|
| On the other hand, I recommend trying to make a minimal system
| with only a kernel and shell and then add to it as desired.
| That way you'll really get an idea of what's needed to do what
| (and realise how bloated common distros are).
|
| A long time ago, I went through "DOS from scratch" and "Windows
| from scratch" in a similar fashion.
| guerrilla wrote:
| You get out of it what you put into it. Don't just follow the
| instructions, find out what everything is and what it does,
| why the instructions are what they are and why they are in
| the order they are. Maybe learn make and autotools. And for
| the person with way too much time on their hands, read the
| manual for each. For the retired or student on break, read
| some of the source code.
| [deleted]
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Every time I've think about doing LFS, I come to the same
| conclusion that Arch is probably good enough to get the same
| hands-on understanding but without having to do the menial
| work.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| If you follow the guide step-by-step, like an interpreter
| evaluating an LFS build script, you'll probably not get much
| out of LFS.
|
| LFS, KISS and, most recently FreeBSD were extremely
| educational for me. They showed me what each piece of my
| system was for, where to look when things went wrong, where
| to look when I wanted to tweak something, etc.
|
| For a modern Linux installer, liked Debian or Ubuntu, I feel
| like I'm looking off a cliff face into an abyss. They say
| it's "free as in freedom" - and I know it's technically true
| - but I don't feel like I'm equipped to understand the system
| the installer produced without a decade investment of time.
| The way I'd interact with those systems was a lot like "free
| as in free beer" - I knew I _could_ fix it if something
| didn't work quite right, but frankly I didn't know _how_ to
| fix it or where to start. So I just consumed it like I would
| proprietary software; it was a big black box I never looked
| inside.
|
| On KISS, I ported the base system to a raspberry PI as my
| first task - the system was simple enough that I could just
| tackle that out the gate.
|
| For LFS I had a lightbulb moment - understanding what all
| those packages that scrolled by in an "apt" install were
| about, how they fit together, and why a distro needed
| "patches." It taught me what a distribution _was_ and the
| work that went into building and maintaining one. It taught
| me what the "base system" ecosystem consisted of.
|
| With FreeBSD ports, by day 3, I was floating my own patch on
| top of my window manager because the config file didn't have
| a setting I wanted.
|
| As a sibling said, you get out what you put in.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Strangely my last moment of shock is not trying bare metal
| linux, beneater 6502, z80 Pcm not to mention Hercules ibm
| ...etc as there are still too many components. As said of
| it does not work not sure I know how to try. Even fixing
| grub2 does not help.
|
| But recently I found I am using boot camp and that blow hot
| air around you forced me to find a solution. On macOS side
| I pay for a patch ... totally expect to pay but then it is
| just one setting (no 100% cpu max 99%, but not help much)
| and then a setting patch on not using turbo. That is it. It
| is a shock. Can you just manipulate all these without
| programming? And without payment? Just tinker a bit and
| take the risk to do a windows registry setting ...
|
| As open source has indicated, you can learn from both and
| try to mix them. And as free as liberty, non free beer can
| still carry some message.
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(page generated 2021-10-10 23:00 UTC)