Linux From Scratch 7.1 Published - 3.2.6 Kernel + GCC 4.6.2
h-online.com
h-online.com
I still like the idea of a minimally patched system built and configured from the ground up. Building everything from source takes a long time, so I didn't do Linux-From-Scratch more than once and instead most of my linux machines are now running ArchLinux, which has a similar philosophy about systems except that they distribute compiled binaries.
Anyways, if you haven't built many programs from source before, this is a great way to get a curated introduction. Worth it in many ways.
Can you elaborate? Part of my everyday life as a coder is downloading packages and building them, so I'm curious how this brings more to the table. I flipped through the book (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/7.1/) and couldn't tell..
It's great that the Linux world has become so sugar-coated, and typical build instructions for source packages nowadays can be as simple as a list of apt-get packages to install followed by "./configure && make && sudo make install" but this glosses over an awful lot, and turns your build and runtime dependencies into a black box.
When I used Ubuntu, I'm not sure I ever even needed that.
So if you know how to build and install regular software, you might still be interested in cross-compiling and creating a tiny Linux kernel and rootfs you can boot in an emulator like qemu. You can either use glibc and GNU userspace or use ucLibc and busybox, or perhaps glibc+busybox.
If you already know how to bootstrap a Linux system, then you can go through the book and build a few dozen packages by hand and sooner or later you will learn to appreciate the efforts of Debian (and other) package maintainers go through.
* Parse build systems such as configure.in, Tupfile.. for options and dependencies and use simple machine learning for classification of options
* Use some sort of locality sensitive hashing to sort packages thus easy to categorize without arbitrary naming
* Meta framework allowing for building different package formats such as rpm, deb..etc.
* Quality control as well as PGO and such via rspec (or something as malleable).
Gentoo or Exherbo do all by hand and in shell which becomes time consuming and incredibly brittle. All this could easily be broken down into individual parts.