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Comment by grifaton | Hacker News Reader

It's a great way to learn how Linux works. I don't know of anybody using a Linux they've built from scratch for anything other than their education, though.

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I used Linux from Scratch as my regular operating system during two years. It was very fun to know that I built everything that I was using. The system was also good because only softwares that I really need were installed. But one sad day, I needed to format the hard drive. I wouldn't have the patience to build everything from scratch again. So, I installed Ubuntu. :-(

i am really curious suppose i have machine X everything configured and i have a new machine Y same architecture(let 64bit) can i port from one two another.

I am wondering if it would be as easy as doing a dd from the old disk to an external an then to an extended partition in the new machine HD...

You could if the new machine was very similar to the old one. In practice, the new hardware is better in some ways, so just copying everything will either not work at all or only work sub-optimally.

OTOH, your personal application configuration files (editor, window manager, etc.) can nearly always be copied as-is without causing any problems. Some people have been copying the same .emacs from machine to machine for years, if not decades, upgrading Emacs all the while.

If I wanted to learn how to do it myself but still let it be repeatable, would it be a good idea to write a script or scripts that does it instead of running all the commands by hand?

Hm, apparently, there are at least two meanings of "how Linux works".

To learn how Linux works, I would recommend Linux internals, because from skimming the TOC, it seems similar to "UNIX internals, the new frontiers". The latter book does not mention Linux, but probably learns you more about what I would describe as "how Linux works" than this book.

This book is more of a 'how do you build a new distribution from scratch'. Doing that will learn you a bit about the userland tools and their dependencies. That can be fun to do and useful, but it is a different thing.

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