Linux from Scratch

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 kept an LFS system going for a few months (on a wretchedly awful by modern standards celeron “net top”) until eventually making a mess I couldn’t figure out how to untangle during a system upgrade. this gave me the sheer force of will necessary to later do things like own the multiplatform build system for an ocaml based distributed system (mina)

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.

Didn't do it for a while, I would benefit from a little refresh.

Is there a Web version running in a VM/container in the browser?

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.

From the news page:

> Bruce Dubbs - 2026/09/01

> The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 13.1.

Confirmed Linux user with the good ol 2000 web style. Great job!

The last release of the no longer maintained sysvinit version is here (the default is systemd now) https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/12.4/

What's the news? This manual has been with us since forever.

We did that, but in containers. https://stagex.tools/

List of (not all Linux) distributions that can be bootstrapped from source:

https://github.com/vasi/bootstrappable-distros

The best way to learn linux !

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The fastest way to learn and remember what Linux is about

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

This whole project wastes time that could be spent learning operating system design and it spends it telling users to download files, extract them, and run ./configure; make; make install 100 times.

LFS is really, really bad. Also, reading the Linux kernel documentation to understand how to do it right is infuriating because it too is really, really bad.