8 ms·

Build your own Linux

187 points by ashitlerferad 9y ago

zengid 9y ago
Funny how I was just looking for something like this. Just finished a whirlwind summer semester using Gentoo in a course on Linux admin, so I've been wanting to dig in a bit deeper.
- pfranz 9y ago
  Back in my day it was http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ Anyone familiar enough with both to know the difference? I used the LFS docs recently when trying to build a custom version of GCC.
  - joshumax 9y ago
    Looks like this site may go into some more detail of how the specific packages interact to create a "standard" Linux distribution more than the LFS series does; but I'm not sure how much has changed regarding that in recent times... Even the faded BLFS book I was gifted in 6th grade seems to be more focused on just getting the packages built and installed into the LFS root than going in depth about their internals/function. Even though tools like buildroot/OE/Yocto offer much better tools to make a Linux from scratch, I think both of these offer a great way to quickly gain at least some insight into Linux + userspace
  - erikb 9y ago
    Honestly there are loads of projects where people don't analyse the existing solutions and just start, you know, from scratch.
enriquto 9y ago
how feasible would it be to build a true 64 bit system ? (i.e., the ints are also 64 bits)
- majewsky 9y ago
  That's not what "64-bit system" means. "64-bit system" means that addresses (i.e. pointers) are 64 bits wide, not ints.
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    And I believe all the major 64-bit instruction sets actually use 48-bit addresses at present, so software/compilers can use the top 16 as tag bits. (In addition to the bottom 3, assuming alignment on 8-byte boundaries).
    - JoshTriplett 9y ago
      > And I believe all the major 64-bit instruction sets actually use 48-bit addresses at present, so software/compilers can use the top 16 as tag bits. Not at all a safe assumption in general; architectures evolve over time, and in addition, that address space is split such that kernel addresses have those bits set, not cleared.
      - smitherfield 9y ago
        Didn't mean to imply that was a good idea, just that it's possible. It looks like the top supercomputers are getting close to surpassing 64 petabytes (56 bits byte-addressed) of virtual memory space, so 16-bit tags are right out. A 48-bit byte-addressed memory space is 256 terabytes, which is getting snug for high-end servers but still 15±5 years out for consumer hardware. 48-bit byte-addressed: 256 terabytes 48-bit word-addressed: 2 petabytes 56-bit byte-addressed: 64 petabytes 56-bit word-addressed: 512 petabytes
        justincormack 9y ago
        NVDIMMs are about to change this, addressed like memory but with around 10 times as much data, so address space is about to jump.
    - 9y ago
newscracker 9y ago
The harder part of building a Linux distribution/system would be getting to use the hardware you have and exploiting its full potential, especially those that are not built with Linux in mind. I switched an old Mac to run Linux sometime ago and have documented issues I faced and the limitations I still live with. Most of it is related to decent trackpad support, GUI options for apps/functions I need, and the customization of keyboard shortcuts system wide (coming from OS X/macOS). A lot of information as well as applications I found were simply outdated and not maintained. I've also spent quite a bit of time just to get the system in a shape that's a bit more amenable to me (as opposed to adjusting myself completely to how a specific distribution of desktop Linux works by default). It's nowhere close to perfect for me, but it's the best choice with constant OS/security updates for old hardware that's unsupported by the manufacturer (Apple, in this case). My advice to anyone wanting to use Linux would be to look for hardware that has been built with Linux in mind. That will save you time, which you can then use to do more productive work/learning (unless your area of interest is in learning about hardware compatibility, developing drivers yourself, tweaking various config files, etc.).
- marbu 9y ago
  > look for hardware that has been built with Linux in mind This boils down to a simple thing to check: Are drives for this piece of hardware included in vanilla kernel? If the answer is yes, it's a good sign, even more when the driver comes from the company building the hw.
fizixer 9y ago
I was about to go hard on this because I came across a similar link a few days ago that had absolutely no mention of the excellent existing project on this topic, the LFS project [1]. This page does make multiple mentions of it, but in a very offhanded way. I would encourage the people behind this url to make a case upfront about why someone should use this link as opposed to directly going to LFS, and what do they have that LFS doesn't. [1] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
- marrone12 9y ago
  Yes, Linux From Scratch has been a product for a very long time.
- veganjay 9y ago
  Exactly. What are the differences? From an organizational structure, I see that buildyourownlinux.com is brought to us by Linux Academy, while linuxfromscratch.org is not affiliated with any other organization (as far as I can tell). From a technical standpoint, I'm curious what differs. From what I recall, there are several reboots required during LFS - but at first glance I don't see any mention in BYOL.
  - Danihan 9y ago
    One works and one isn't maintained.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - pfranz 9y ago
      Are you saying LFS isn't maintained? The last stable version was released in February 2017. RC1 for the next release was made today. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/news.html http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/news.html
- eddieh 9y ago
  Seriously though, is this a fork of LFS or what?
ytjohn 9y ago
These days, for the situations in which I want to make my own distro, I go to [buildroot]. I recently (well, 2 years ago) built an image to replace DOS on a Pentium 75 system. Built an small distro containing nothing more than a a couple users and minicom, with minicom attaching to the serial port, and ssh access. Sure, I could have done this with a raspberry pi and a usb serial adapter, but this was more of an educational side project. I was already re-using the PC power supply and case to power a standalone APRS setup, and figured I should be able to re-use the computer and serial port to provide remote access. [buildroot]: https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/
- helper 9y ago
  +1 for buildroot. I've used it both professionally and on personal projects. All of my rpi projects run on tiny buildroot images (usually with a single go binary). I love that it produces an image I can write straight to an SD card that is ready to go without me having to plug the RPI into a monitor to configure it. However LFS and BYOL aren't really about making it easy to build a "distro". They really are about learning how all the pieces fit together.
dopeboy 9y ago
Tangent - when I was 18, I wanted to be hardcore. I thought I was above Fedora and a (then up and coming) Ubuntu. So I printed out the compile-from-scratch manual for Gentoo. It was a solid 20 pages front and back. I made it four pages in and gave up. This link gave me flashbacks to that manual.
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  4 Pages? That's the table of contents and the introduction :p
xurukefi 9y ago
> Our goal is to produce a small, sleek system well-suited for hosting containers or being employed as a virtual machine. This is probably one of the few use cases where building your own linux distro is a sensible idea. Other projects like LFS encourage desktop users to build their own linux-distro, which is beyond insanity in my opinion. Keeping an LFS system up to date with security patches should be virtually impossible unless you set aside a decent portion of your daily free time for this task, which probably nobody is willing to do. I can see how building your own linux distro is educational and fun, but in terms of security and maintenance it is an absolute nightmare.
- czep 9y ago
  > Keeping an LFS system up to date with security patches should be virtually impossible unless you set aside a decent portion of your daily free time for this task It's really not that hard once you know what software is actually on your system. LFS enforces discipline because you're less likely to blindly install hundreds of useless packages just because your distro bundles them. On a nice svelte system, all you need to do is monitor a few mailing lists and decide if something is worth upgrading. More often than not, you'll be able to patch your systems faster than a distro will be able to release an update, because the source is in your hands at the same time.

187 points by ashitlerferad 9y ago

Funny how I was just looking for something like this. Just finished a whirlwind summer semester using Gentoo in a course on Linux admin, so I've been wanting to dig in a bit deeper.

pfranz 9y ago
Back in my day it was http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ Anyone familiar enough with both to know the difference? I used the LFS docs recently when trying to build a custom version of GCC.
- joshumax 9y ago
  Looks like this site may go into some more detail of how the specific packages interact to create a "standard" Linux distribution more than the LFS series does; but I'm not sure how much has changed regarding that in recent times... Even the faded BLFS book I was gifted in 6th grade seems to be more focused on just getting the packages built and installed into the LFS root than going in depth about their internals/function. Even though tools like buildroot/OE/Yocto offer much better tools to make a Linux from scratch, I think both of these offer a great way to quickly gain at least some insight into Linux + userspace
- erikb 9y ago
  Honestly there are loads of projects where people don't analyse the existing solutions and just start, you know, from scratch.

enriquto 9y ago

how feasible would it be to build a true 64 bit system ? (i.e., the ints are also 64 bits)

majewsky 9y ago
That's not what "64-bit system" means. "64-bit system" means that addresses (i.e. pointers) are 64 bits wide, not ints.
- smitherfield 9y ago
  And I believe all the major 64-bit instruction sets actually use 48-bit addresses at present, so software/compilers can use the top 16 as tag bits. (In addition to the bottom 3, assuming alignment on 8-byte boundaries).
  - JoshTriplett 9y ago
    > And I believe all the major 64-bit instruction sets actually use 48-bit addresses at present, so software/compilers can use the top 16 as tag bits. Not at all a safe assumption in general; architectures evolve over time, and in addition, that address space is split such that kernel addresses have those bits set, not cleared.
    - smitherfield 9y ago
      Didn't mean to imply that was a good idea, just that it's possible. It looks like the top supercomputers are getting close to surpassing 64 petabytes (56 bits byte-addressed) of virtual memory space, so 16-bit tags are right out. A 48-bit byte-addressed memory space is 256 terabytes, which is getting snug for high-end servers but still 15±5 years out for consumer hardware. 48-bit byte-addressed: 256 terabytes 48-bit word-addressed: 2 petabytes 56-bit byte-addressed: 64 petabytes 56-bit word-addressed: 512 petabytes
      - justincormack 9y ago
        NVDIMMs are about to change this, addressed like memory but with around 10 times as much data, so address space is about to jump.
  - 9y ago

newscracker 9y ago

The harder part of building a Linux distribution/system would be getting to use the hardware you have and exploiting its full potential, especially those that are not built with Linux in mind. I switched an old Mac to run Linux sometime ago and have documented issues I faced and the limitations I still live with. Most of it is related to decent trackpad support, GUI options for apps/functions I need, and the customization of keyboard shortcuts system wide (coming from OS X/macOS). A lot of information as well as applications I found were simply outdated and not maintained. I've also spent quite a bit of time just to get the system in a shape that's a bit more amenable to me (as opposed to adjusting myself completely to how a specific distribution of desktop Linux works by default). It's nowhere close to perfect for me, but it's the best choice with constant OS/security updates for old hardware that's unsupported by the manufacturer (Apple, in this case). My advice to anyone wanting to use Linux would be to look for hardware that has been built with Linux in mind. That will save you time, which you can then use to do more productive work/learning (unless your area of interest is in learning about hardware compatibility, developing drivers yourself, tweaking various config files, etc.).

marbu 9y ago
> look for hardware that has been built with Linux in mind This boils down to a simple thing to check: Are drives for this piece of hardware included in vanilla kernel? If the answer is yes, it's a good sign, even more when the driver comes from the company building the hw.

fizixer 9y ago

I was about to go hard on this because I came across a similar link a few days ago that had absolutely no mention of the excellent existing project on this topic, the LFS project [1]. This page does make multiple mentions of it, but in a very offhanded way. I would encourage the people behind this url to make a case upfront about why someone should use this link as opposed to directly going to LFS, and what do they have that LFS doesn't. [1] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org http://www.linuxfromscratch.org

marrone12 9y ago
Yes, Linux From Scratch has been a product for a very long time.
veganjay 9y ago
Exactly. What are the differences? From an organizational structure, I see that buildyourownlinux.com is brought to us by Linux Academy, while linuxfromscratch.org is not affiliated with any other organization (as far as I can tell). From a technical standpoint, I'm curious what differs. From what I recall, there are several reboots required during LFS - but at first glance I don't see any mention in BYOL.
- Danihan 9y ago
  One works and one isn't maintained.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pfranz 9y ago
    Are you saying LFS isn't maintained? The last stable version was released in February 2017. RC1 for the next release was made today. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/news.html http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/news.html
eddieh 9y ago
Seriously though, is this a fork of LFS or what?

ytjohn 9y ago

These days, for the situations in which I want to make my own distro, I go to [buildroot]. I recently (well, 2 years ago) built an image to replace DOS on a Pentium 75 system. Built an small distro containing nothing more than a a couple users and minicom, with minicom attaching to the serial port, and ssh access. Sure, I could have done this with a raspberry pi and a usb serial adapter, but this was more of an educational side project. I was already re-using the PC power supply and case to power a standalone APRS setup, and figured I should be able to re-use the computer and serial port to provide remote access. [buildroot]: https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/

helper 9y ago
+1 for buildroot. I've used it both professionally and on personal projects. All of my rpi projects run on tiny buildroot images (usually with a single go binary). I love that it produces an image I can write straight to an SD card that is ready to go without me having to plug the RPI into a monitor to configure it. However LFS and BYOL aren't really about making it easy to build a "distro". They really are about learning how all the pieces fit together.

dopeboy 9y ago

Tangent - when I was 18, I wanted to be hardcore. I thought I was above Fedora and a (then up and coming) Ubuntu. So I printed out the compile-from-scratch manual for Gentoo. It was a solid 20 pages front and back. I made it four pages in and gave up. This link gave me flashbacks to that manual.

jiggunjer 9y ago
4 Pages? That's the table of contents and the introduction :p

xurukefi 9y ago

> Our goal is to produce a small, sleek system well-suited for hosting containers or being employed as a virtual machine. This is probably one of the few use cases where building your own linux distro is a sensible idea. Other projects like LFS encourage desktop users to build their own linux-distro, which is beyond insanity in my opinion. Keeping an LFS system up to date with security patches should be virtually impossible unless you set aside a decent portion of your daily free time for this task, which probably nobody is willing to do. I can see how building your own linux distro is educational and fun, but in terms of security and maintenance it is an absolute nightmare.

czep 9y ago
> Keeping an LFS system up to date with security patches should be virtually impossible unless you set aside a decent portion of your daily free time for this task It's really not that hard once you know what software is actually on your system. LFS enforces discipline because you're less likely to blindly install hundreds of useless packages just because your distro bundles them. On a nice svelte system, all you need to do is monitor a few mailing lists and decide if something is worth upgrading. More often than not, you'll be able to patch your systems faster than a distro will be able to release an update, because the source is in your hands at the same time.