Linux from Scratch
linuxfromscratch.org50 points by sippingabonedry 2 hours ago
50 points by sippingabonedry 2 hours ago
LFS takes the wrong approach in my opinion. I did it once manually over a couple of days. I suppose I hoped enduring the pain of waiting for the packages to compile would somehow make me smarter. It didn’t. I didn’t learn much. It was like following a baking recipe. I know I need to add eggs and sugar in the ratio it says but I’d be damned if I could tell you why that specific ratio works.
It’s just too much to take in at once. You start by building a cross compilation toolchain but… why? And you add the bootloader dead last, even though it’s the first thing you see when you boot a Linux machine?
I reckon a better approach would be to build it step by step, only adding new things once you’ve discovered a need for them. First you get the bootloader working, then you get it to actually load the initramfs and kernel, etc… you could even create your own extremely simple initramfs first before adding dracut, etc…
This gets you to a system you can boot and play with asap. And then you can slowly start to discover why you actually need all these things through exploration and experimentation.
I've learned the most from LFS long time ago, when I had no internet. I had a mismatching set of Slackware and redhat source CDs, and LFS itself didn't match the versions on CDs too. Since then I can build anything and anywhere, even if it's not cooperating :)
I liked KISS for this
It was like automated LFS from git
FreeBSD’s Makefile system is also in this ballpark
Compiling the packages doesn’t teach much it’s all the glue in between. No? It’s the startup scripts and the configs and creating a kernel and all the things.
It’s on my list of things to do when I have some free time
You know, you could also just read about each step to know more. I mean if you feel you're following a baking recipe then you can just... read about it more. And then you have LFS to have a simple way of experimenting whether you want to change anything or not. Also technically you don't need to have a bootloader installed on your main hard drive if you already have it on other disk.
I mean eh... last time I checked this was Hacker news. Yesterday there was an Ask HN topic how to enable dark mode on HN. Is this the new hacker culture? Complaining that the resources just merely point to some direction instead of pointing out specifics?
You can tell it's written by real Linux users because the landing page UX doesn't make it immediately obvious where to even start reading.
Took me half a second to realize I would probably start with "LFS :: Linux From Scratch is the main book, the base from which all other projects are derived."
From the news page:
> Bruce Dubbs - 2026/09/01
> The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 13.1.
What's the news? This manual has been with us since forever.
I'm glad to see its still being maintained after more than 25 years since I last used it.
For a long time (probably 2002-2010) I really wanted to do LFS. But I've been on Gentoo since 2004 which, over the last ~22 years, has probably exposed me to almost everything LFS would have, plus a lot more it wouldn't have. I still wish I'd did it way back when. I probably would stumbled through fewer issues had I.
The last release of the no longer maintained sysvinit version is here (the default is systemd now) https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/12.4/
List of (not all Linux) distributions that can be bootstrapped from source:
Related. Others?
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I did LFS once, a long long time ago (days of RedHat 7.3, I'd say, 2002), and it was quite educational! It's a good way to learn the fundamentals of what comprises an actual Linux system