Linux From Scratch

Anybody /LFS/ here? I'm thinking about trying it, but I don't know if I have enough time to commit to it at the moment

bumping for interest. Didn't like gentoo, LFS is my next target

have another bump

I Built a LFS system. Very satisfying. You should read the book through a few times before you begin. This *is* rocket science.

how much time would it take approximately
say if i worked on it for 30 minutes every night, could it be finished in under 2 weeks?

yep, many years ago - was great fun

A couple of tips

Make tar backups of your 'stages'
pre-read the initial setup parts (up until you have a booting minimal system) THEN start working while referencing the book
Pre-download all the packages you need (I put all the download links in a file and then wget it)
MAKE BACKUPS BEFORE YOU MAKE MAJOR CHANGES (striping debug symbols, removing docs...)
Plan ahead; if you have some custom packages you want outside of the standard minimal system you should plan ahead to add them

Once I was done I had a stage1/stage2/stage3 tar's and I maintained separate tars of the stage3 with and without debuging symbols as well as a seperate
doc's tar.

I'm also interested in how long it takes. Weeks? Months?

depends on your hardware (make -j$(nproc) for example), but I did that LFS build in in a few hours (maybe 8-12 hours of paying half attention to it while it ran in a chroot in the background)
I use Linux everyday however so I was familiar with the concepts in the book, if you aren't used to boot strapping systems like that then it may take a couple sessions of on and off work to get LFS to the point where you want it.

As an armchair historian with a decent grasp of what goes into a rocket and making it work, it's probably harder than rocket science.

so as someone who's used Arch for a couple years, and recently installed gentoo just to try it, it shouldn't be too bad?

Yeah you should be fine

I did this and I know absolutely nothing about linux. All you do is copy and paste the commands from the book and wait for the shit to compile. The only thing that really takes a long time is the GNC C Compiler and most of that time is used running the bloated ass test suite. Any modern computer can probably do the whole thing in less than a few hours. Took me around 6-7 on Virtualbox. Also the system configuration isn't as copy and paste like the rest of the book so you'll maybe have to put in some effort to make your internet work correctly or get your bash prompt to display what you want. Overall though, it's really not hard at all. Oh, and if you don't like vi or vim you can just substitute nano at that chapter and it will work fine. If you want a good build environment, the best I've found is Arch with the base-devel group installed. Everything will be ready for you from the get go. If your host system is Ubuntu you'll have to install some extra shit and change the symlink for bin/sh.

it's a retarded waste of time.
why should I compile my own binaries when I can just chroot into a gentoo stage3 and compile my kernel and be done?

Yep, ditched all distros and use it exclusively

I also wrote a distributed build system for it in C which assembles and deploys software for all the hardware on my network.

After finding and learning it since 2005, nothing else really compares.

I would like to find a good kernel and write a POSIX layer for it or if it already has one to import the GNU or some other base system for it instead desu

Can I make LFS into Ubuntu?

I like Ubuntu, but I want to learn shit.

Is it true it gives you problems if you tried to do lfs in a VM so you could save at any time?

...

I've tried it a few years ago but unless you just want to learn, make a specialized livecd for maintenance or something or make your own complete distro it's not really worth the effort these days. I had enough manual package management back when I used Slackware and I'm not going to be assed to make my own manager from scratch when there are already a dozen different ones out there that are already better than anything I could shit out.

op here, i've decided to just go for it. making a debian live usb right now

should be fun :^)

Kind of considering doing it over summer. How long should it take if my Linux knowledge is relatively basic?

let us know how it goes

report back pls

i may not be able to do it tonight, having issues with my experiment machine overheating

i'll document my progress and report back once i fix this though

Literary nothing difficult.

Nope. Stop being a faggot.

As an engineering student with a decent grasp of fluid mechanics and combustion, it's probably not.