LFS: Info about personal expierences

[DSwain]

Anybody around here ever use LFS? I was curious to see what people though. i tried it, and i have (or had) all the packages, but it was really confusing reading from that book, so i gave up. Installing Gentoo now. I just wanna know- how is it getting it installed, speed wise, issues, etc.

[bwkaz]

Works great for me. What's the problem?

Are you comfortable working in a shell normally, btw? Which book version were you reading?

[DSwain]

Version 5. Well, i've installed Gentoo like 10 times coming up (doing a Stage1 right now) and i just found it intensly confusing. I don't know what exactly threw me off though, it was generally confusing. I may try it again someday but i was like really in awe. But i was really curious about any problems or benifits people had with it, like would it be worth replacing gentoo with.

But yeah, i guess i'm not the best working straight from a shell. I can kinda do it, but there seems like there's so much more to know about using it than imaginable and it just gets confusing.

i think what else might have confused me was the fact that it needs to be installed from another system, and it just seems strange to do it like that. i was using a livecd though so it wasn't too bad or anything. But the idea of installing Bash and BinUtils and so on just seemed very odd. I didn't really understand how binutils could possibly be built without bash or those things. I guess that's the idea behind the host system, but i don't see how they can just transfer over to this distro.

DSwain=Confused

[bwkaz]

The build system for binutils does use bash (not to mention gcc!), yes. But it uses the bash and gcc from the host (that's why you need a host) to build a statically linked binutils. Then you use that binutils to build a static gcc, and you use that to build glibc.

Then, you rebuild binutils and gcc (dynamically this time, linking against the new glibc), and use them to build the rest of the stuff in chapter 5.

Then, you use those chapter 5 tools to build a real system, after entering chroot at the start of chapter 6.

All of chapter 5 is dedicated to building a temporary system that has just enough tools in it to build a real system that's completely independent from the host (the results of chapter 5 are relatively independent -- that's why you build glibc once, binutils twice, and gcc twice (specifying make bootstrap at least once), after all). The end result is that you can build from an extremely old host (one of the developers has built from Red Hat 6.1, after updating make and one other utility so that glibc would build), and with a few more changes, you could even build from a non-Linux system like Solaris.

[DSwain]

i see...now what's the difference between statically linking it and dynamically linking it? I think i read it in the book, but i forget exactly now.

I will try again, but i'll start from a system installed on the hard disk, so i can be sure it has all the development things i need. Thanks for the insight though. What can you say about preformance though, like boot times, etc.