It's been years since I went through this, but whenever someone asks me what they should read to get a deeper understanding of what a Linux distribution is, I point them to this.

Had to go through it 4 times to reach a stable distro, I learned so much doing it

for as long as i've been running and tinkering with linux, i really need to run this marathon before i get much older. i don't think it'll happen til i quit my job and have more time to actually enjoy using my computer :(

Making bespoke linux distros should be quite a good fit for LLM agents, especially given the recent results with the LLM-authored web browser.

Every time I see this, I upvote it

I’m sure it’s different than it was when I was a teenager but building Linux from scratch was the thing that got me into computers as a kid

It shows that computers can be accessible _and modifiable_ at the lowest levels

This was probably the best thing I've done to learn the ins and outs of a running Linux system: I think it would be amazing to re-do it with a modern Linux stack (systemd + Wayland), but it can really remove all the "magic" from the full OS implementation for you.

However, I've done it in 1999 and ran that system until 2001 when it became too much of a trouble to recompile everything and battle dependencies manually — note that LFS was not as detailed then either, so many dependencies you had to track yourself, and some were very obscure!

Yes, the time investment was high, but I was a high school student starting college with too much interest in something like this and obviously enough time on my hands (after which I was so "smart" to switch to Slackware, a one-man show where I also ended up having manually compiled versions of "small packages" like XFree86 and GNOME, which I was contributing to: when "GARNOME" showed up, that was a revelation! etc)

So if you can afford it, do it: using Linux will never be the same again!

I bought the dead tree version of this book back in ~2006 or so.

I used to work in a business park in Seattle and the company next door to us operated a PC recycling warehouse. There were piles of old 386/486-era PCs in various states of disrepair just piled up behind their building. I'd go out there once in awhile and pick-through their piles looking for Intel CPUs, sticks of RAM, and hard drives. Find a good chassis with intact motherboard.

I loved putting that stuff together and installing Linux on those machines. I cut my teeth on Linux and LFS building computers out of those Frankensteins.

Years ago, installing Gentoo from an early stage was also a good experiment.

Nowadays they've deprecated all stages but stage3. It's still fun, but bootstrapping Gentoo from stage1 was a Linux-from-scratch-like experience (not quite, but similar).

I did this in 2001 on a 200MHz Pentium with 128MB RAM. Took about eight hours. Great experience.

I understand it still takes about eight hours. Faster CPUs but busier software cancelled each other out.

Some things never change.

This was a pivotal project for me as a young lad learning Linux and software engineering back in the day. Can't recommend it enough. So many little frustrations and painpoints to overcome, wasn't easy , and shows you the ropes of what's to come.

So many good memories I had running through this way back when and it gave such a good and deep look into how a fully functioning system worked. It removed a lot of the mystery of this distro vs that distro and how all the pieces fit together. I still use some of the knowledge I gained from this in my day-to-day work, some of which is sorely lacking by others doing seemingly the same job as me.

I remember going through this and there was a point where you were running a stock, generic kernel before having built a specialized kernel with modules and options you wanted. I apparently ran up against thermal limits on this laptop because power management was one of the options for you to configure. I had to zoom through that section with a box fan pointed at that laptop so I could get power management and throttling to work so it wouldn't randomly shut down. Good times.

I used the same laptop I went through the first time with the same LFS install for a number of years after that until my day job killed my interest in doing this stuff in my free time. I switched to Debian after that and never looked back.

Like others are saying, I always recommend going through this for those that want a deeper understanding of linux, the kernel, and all its accoutrements.

we had this as an actual subject in class

One of the most incredible computer experiences.

Is it educational to do this on a VM or should I break out my old thinkpad?

I completed my Cross-Linux From Scratch distro in 2014, targeting the original Raspberry Pi since I was frustrated with the lack of (at the time) minimalist distros.

It was extra-hard, due to the cross-compiling nature of targeting the ARMv6 cpu family - but I learned a massive amount along the way.

Even though CentOS-minimal was released for Raspberry Pi by time I completed the project, I had so much fun it didn't matter. I ended up making a custom build system, consisting of a hodgepodge of bash scripts all wrapped together with a Makefile. My self-hosted Jenkins build server (old mini computer shoved on my book case) would run builds and produce the image artifact - those were the days...

The final distro image was ~40MB, which was impressive to me on it's own.

In the next part, I hope I can write a kernel from scratch, haha.

I too did this, around 2003/4

It was during my great "Try all the Linux" period, and I had trouble with it compiling on my slackware system, but it compiled just fine on my red hat system (before RHEL)

It was a toy for me, I built it just to see if I could, built it a few times, but was running red hat or slackware as my daily driver.

During that period I also tried the BSDs, Free, Dragonfly, Net, and Open

It was so much fun getting the hang of how each OS differed, the nuances, the ins and outs.

(FTR, I switched to Ubuntu late 2005, and haven't moved since - apt is/was the best thing since recycled electrons)

This is such an awesome project.

I had a lot of fun doing LFS plus a bit of BLFS and then I adapted it to my memory safe linux project https://fil-c.org/pizlix

I haven't gone through this but now I really want to.

Moved to native Linux on the desktop a few weeks ago after 15+ years of using Linux on the server and spending a majority of my time in WSL in Windows for the last decade.

I've learned so many new things in this short period of time. Tracing down memory leaks with GPU processes, misbehaving GPU drivers, power saving modes, etc..

Related. Others?

Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41747966 - Oct 2024 (159 comments)

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Linux from Scratch Version 12.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37648808 - Sept 2023 (28 comments)

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Linux from Scratch with Training Wheels - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28820602 - Oct 2021 (41 comments)

Linux from Scratch 10.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24350738 - Sept 2020 (49 comments)

Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238015 - Aug 2020 (86 comments)

Major Proposed Changes to Linux From Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23787526 - July 2020 (93 comments)

Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20168343 - June 2019 (15 comments)

Ask HN: Is the Linux From Scratch project still relevant? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20149111 - June 2019 (7 comments)

Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16823110 - April 2018 (1 comment)

Linux from Scratch Version 8.2 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510333 - March 2018 (2 comments)

Linux from Scratch – build your own Linux distro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829373 - June 2016 (57 comments)

Linux from Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392057 - Sept 2014 (1 comment)

Welcome to Linux From Scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4488162 - Sept 2012 (71 comments)

Linux From Scratch 7.1 Published - 3.2.6 Kernel + GCC 4.6.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3677350 - March 2012 (13 comments)

Linux From Scratch 7 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3171448 - Oct 2011 (27 comments)

Ask HN: Linux from Scratch.. Should I try it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779665 - Oct 2010 (58 comments)

How to build custom Linux from source code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743843 - Aug 2009 (1 comment)

This and "Ray tracing in one week-end" are HN classics that I wish I had completed long ago.