LFS

[Calum]

hello.

so what i have done is i have ordered a copy of LFS. it's just 2 CDs with all the stuff you can download from the LFS site.
I also saved myself a PDF copy of Gerard Beekmans' LFS book 4.0 which tells you how to install LFS. i had a quick look through it, it all seems pretty easy (although a lot of it is stuff i haven't actually done before) but what i want to know is, will i need to print out this book? will i find myself stuck not able to read the pdf at some point do you think? as far as i can see, most of the stuff is done in an existing linux installation (i will likely use slackware or even zipslack if i am feeling masochistic!) so therefore i could use xpdf or gv to read the pdf, but if i am required to reboot into LFS at some point before any pdf reader is installed then i can see myself cursing and swearing while i try to make notes on twenty or thirty pages of information so i know what to do after the reboot!

as a side note, anybody know a good text based pdf reader? no matter actually, by the time you read this i will have googled it anyway.

thanks in advance for any hints, comments or unrelated musings you might add!

edit: what a dumbass i am! i'll just download the text only version of the file! doh!

[Void Main]

I guess you only have one machine? That must suck. :)

[Calum]

well technically i have two but one of them (the laptop) has died totally, so that adds up to a whopping total of one. and it's a celery 700 too. Not the best but ideal for listening to music, writing assignments and so forth.

still i am making the most of the 15Gb i have, i have a home partition, a swap partition and another six partitions which i have got various linuces and a freeBSD variously installed on.

[Lord C]

/me imagine's VoidMan's room, with at least 20 *nix boxes buzzing away

[Void Main]

Nope, only 10 here at home (that's physical machines and not counting virtual machines).

[Nobber]

So Calum, how did it go with LFS?

I tried LFS 3.3 about nine months ago. Took about 4 hours to get the base system up and running on my Athlon 1.4GHz PC. Added X and some other software, using BLFS as a guide where possible, and still everything worked nicely. So I stuck with it, and I'm still using it today - though it's more of an LFS-3.3-with-various-bits-updated system these days.

Compiling everything from source is very...freeing. I think I'd find it pretty difficult or annoying to go back to a properly package-managed here-it-is-all-done-for-you distribution now.

[Calum]

i have put LFS on the back burner for the nonce.
i currently have one peanut linux partition, one slack partition and one LFS partition, the LFS one has the bz2 packages and about 1.5 GB of music and stuff from some CDs i got back from the movers.

Anyway, once i have cleared that out of the LFS partition i will be able to give it some more attention, which will be whenever i have the time.

the fact that slack 9 works fine is kind of what's delaying me too, it's kind of odd for me to use a system that stays 100% functional despite all my fiddling and poking around!