6 ms·

I really like the idea, really tried following the process several times. But each time it just turned into a copy-incomprehensible-commands-into-the-terminal e

by sieste 2y ago

I really like the idea, really tried following the process several times. But each time it just turned into a copy-incomprehensible-commands-into-the-terminal exercise at some point, and I lost motivation. Did anyone experience the same?

exe34 2y ago
it's better if you try to work out what the commands and options are doing. I did this a long time ago, and 15 years later, I realise that it gave me a big advantage over my colleagues who haven't done something like that. "missing xxxxx.so" - they don't even know what that means, whereas I'm already trying to find the so and putting it in ld_library_path to see if it helps.
- spockz 2y ago
  In my experience, whenever a .so was missing it was either due to a missing package on the os package manager level, or a completely broken gcc or llvm setup. I never needed to explicitly add single .so files to a path. (Besides the use case where I specifically wanted to override a malloc implementation.) In which cases did/do you need to add individual files?
  - exe34 2y ago
    in this case it's an in-house monstrosity that's got a lot of various languages and build systems involved, and the moment you update a compiler or build system, everything jumps into a new location for no good reasons. it was just an example though - same issue with .h not found during compilation, or using a different compiler from the system wide one.
  - screcth 2y ago
    In my case, I work with proprietary EDA tools. Vendors love messing with LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Chaos ensues when they override a system library or two versions require mutually incompatible versions. I agree with the comment you are replying to. Having broken my home Linux installs too many times has taught me how to diagnose and fix this sort of issues.
  - nmoura 2y ago
    In my case, when I was a Slackware user before Slackbuilds was created, sometimes I wanted to try out programs for which there was no package. Usually they required a .so file that was not installed and a workaround was to put it manually from a package of another distribution compiled for the same architecture. When the .so file was there, but on another path, a symbolic link was sufficient. The ldd command was a good friend. Of course that was not the best and cleanest solution, having things outside the package management system bothered, but it was enough to experiment programs and I kept track of the changes so I could have the prior state of things. Later on, the Slackbuilds project eased the work and I contributed by writing code to automate the creation of a few packages. I learned a lot from these issues.
keyle 2y ago
Yep, basically. At some point you realise you could do it, but do you really want to go through it all... It's a slog. It is a fun experience though!
- stavros 2y ago
  > It's a slog. It is a fun experience though! Aren't those two opposites?
  - wezdog1 2y ago
    Type 2 fun
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    You've never experienced effort as fun? That is... not flattering.
    - stavros 2y ago
      Effort, yes. Slog, no.
  - whartung 2y ago
    I have a saying for this: An "adventure" is a bad trip, remembered fondly.
pushupentry1219 2y ago
When I was in highschool I had a bunch of free time outside of school days. I used a YouTube guide to install Arch. I failed many many times. But in doing so I almost kind of learnt what each command was doing. I had the same experience when I installed Gentoo. In both cases at first I was copy/pasting commands, but through failure I ended up understanding a lot of what the commands did. And what someone else said below is true as well, actually try and force yourself to understand what you're typing. Even briefly just scanning a man page helps a lot.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I wonder if the wiki would have been an easier start, than YouTube. YouTube is nice for learning things with a visual component, but installing Linux is all text, all the time. The ability to easily hop around and re-read sections on the wiki where necessary (I mean, jumping around is possible on YouTube of course, but it is really easy on the wiki) seem like it would be a big help.
  - pino82 2y ago
    Reading and actually understanding non-trivial text is hard if you are part of a generation that was never challenged to actually learn it. For those people, YouTube (and a few similar shops) are the default way to consume any content. That's what they do all the time. Sure, they somehow know those legacy emojis that you call the latin alphabet. It will just not lead to a deep understanding of text. Another aspect is probably that watching YT clips always has a feeling of being part of something. Some movement, some bubble, some society, whatever. They don't install Arch bcs they want to learn sth, or make some use of the OS. They do it _because_ they found it on YT and they want to be part of it. Maybe they even write comments or make a 'reaction' video. Today it's Arch, tomorrow it's a special pizza recipe from that other guy on Insta. It doesn't really matter.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      I dunno. I’m a millennial so all sorts of stuff was just ascribed to my generation. As a result, I tend to just assume these differences are overstated. I worked with college students fairly recently. They did often reach reflexively for video. But when the written material was good enough, they used it.
pipes 2y ago
Yes this and endlessly unzipping things. I gave up after many many hours. I doubt I learned much from it.
kwanbix 2y ago
Same for me. I tried it about 20 years ago. I didn't fell like I was learning anything, just copy paste like you say. I haven't retried since, but I think it would be much better if they explain what you are doing and why.
rwalle 2y ago
Haven't tried it, but I guess if you were doing this again today, ChatGPT would help a lot.
vbezhenar 2y ago
I built my LFS around 20 years ago. While I followed instructions most of the time, I built some components myself. I remember that I wrote by own init scripts and I think I wrote my own initramfs (not completely sure about it, but I definitely remember tinkering with it and it probably was LFS). I also wanted to implement an isolated build system and my own package manager (basically tar wrapper with file database to be able to uninstall, no fancy dependency stuff), but containers were not invented back then and my skills were not good enough to properly utilize fakeroot, so it never was implemented, although I spent some time experimenting. Today I would do it with docker, exciting time.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Wanting to (and doing it) make my own package manager because of LFS and minimalism in general, good times.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
I haven't tried this but I have used https://github.com/MichielDerhaeg/build-linux https://github.com/MichielDerhaeg/build-linux during my trainings and all my students quite enjoyed the experience. It basically builds a Kernel, libc, busybox, init etc. and gets the whole thing running inside qemu. I found it quite educational and worth the little time I spent on it.
- sheepybloke 2y ago
  I agree! I find systems like OpenEmbedded's Yocto to be super helpful with learning how to build Linux.
zvmaz 2y ago
> Did anyone experience the same? I tried several times, and tried again just recently. I share your sentiment. It perhaps gave me a renewed appreciation of the huge benefits Linux ditributions and package managers give us.
notorandit 2y ago
Nope. I never execute commands without understanding its meaning. Maybe you expect to complete a LFS installation in very little time. Which cannot be the case in general and in this very case in particular
kobalsky 2y ago
I grabbed a random page from the manual: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/chapter05/gcc-pass1.html https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/cha... Every step is explained and every used parameter is documented.
- andrewmcwatters 2y ago
  You grabbed a random page.
- ruszki 2y ago
  I would say "explained". As a layman, who worked with linux previously (and even tried LFS a long time ago), but definitely don't have a deep understanding of linux, and eve my knowledge is not up-to-date: The sed command is not explained at all. Even the description is non-sense if you don't know already what they are talking about. What is this "default directory", why do you need to set it, why there and only there, why that command works? Even the command itself is something, which I need to check the manual what the heck it does, because it's not a simple one. > -enable-default-pie and --enable-default-ssp The description is almost unusable. So we don't need it, but it's "cleaner", which in this context means exactly nothing. So what happens if I left out? Nothing? Then why should I care? > --disable-multilib Okay, it doesn't support "something". I have no idea what is multilib, or why I should care. Basically the next arguments' description tells me that because it wouldn't work the compilation otherwise. And then.. > --disable-threads, --disable-libatomic, --disable-libgomp, --disable-libquadmath, --disable-libssp, --disable-libvtv, --disable-libstdcxx But why would they fail? I want to understand what's happening here, and I need to blindly trust the manual because they just tell me, that "they won't work, believe us". > --enable-languages=c,c++ Why are these the only languages which we need? What are the other languages? So at the end, descriptions are not really helping to understand what's happening, if you don't know already. The last time when I started LFS (about 10 years ago), that was my main problem. That you already need to know almost everything to understand what's really happening, and why, or reading manuals, or trying to find basically unsearchable information (like why libatomic compiling would fail at this step). So after a while, I started the blind copy-pasting, because I didn't have the patience of literary months, and when I realized that this was pointless, I gave up.
aflukasz 2y ago
It feels to me like you have approached this with a wrong mindset, like you focused too much on finishing the whole process. With LFS you must put substantial amount of value into the journey itself. It's not about copy-pasting commands, it's about trying to actually understand what and, more importantly, why your are doing each step. My recollection is that LFS docs were good in helping with that. Or maybe it was coming from reading docs of the actual components as I went along? I don't remember, probably some mix of both. I did set LFS system up once, I think it was 2001 or 2002. I specifically remember that it took many days (due to compilation times), was very interesting, and at the end I was putting final touches to my mutt and slrn configs. With a vague memory that I had some TODO for mutt that I didn't finish, still lingering in my mind, apparently! :) All in all, great and satisfying learning experience. I would not use such system as a daily driver, though. I think it's good only if you have time and want to learn. I'm curious if someone here is brave enough to have different approach.
- oorza 2y ago
  LFS to a computer scientist should be like soap to a chemist. Something you can do as a fun, educational experiment, but not where you source a necessary tool for your life.
- NegativeK 2y ago
  I daily drove it for a few months, back in the early 2000s (like many in this thread, it seems.) I kept it updated by subscribing to Freshmeat emails for releases, and I'd download and install the tarball. My review is that I'm glad I did it, it's a terrible idea, and it's debatable (honestly, not facetiously) as to whether the classes I skipped were more valuable.
mnahkies 2y ago
Last time I tried (probably well over 10 years ago) I struggled more with how long stuff took to compile. The main learning I remember from it was the chroot concept, which then later helped me grasp containerization easier
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Nope. It's a launchpad not meant solely to follow blindly. The point is trial and error experimentation along the way. Can I switch the order of these packages or enable dependency X? It also helps to have a fast x86_64 box with zillions of cores and plenty of RAM and SSD, and also a compiler cache like sccache to speed up rebuilds.
sweeter 2y ago
Yes. I got a little bit out of it, certainly, but it really is mostly an exercise of compiling packages. I was a little disappointed but in the end LFS inspired me to take on a rewrite of the Unix Coreutils in Golang. I learned far more about Unix systems from doing this than anything else. It also improved my skills a lot, I look back on some of this code and cringe a little bit. [1] https://github.com/sweetbbak/go-moreutils https://github.com/sweetbbak/go-moreutils
donio 2y ago
For most people the whole reason to do the exercise is to understand what is involved in a bootstrap process. When you don't understand something you stop and figure out what is going on. There is not much point in blindly running commands that you don't understand.
- lanstin 2y ago
  Except of course getting the OS installed and running.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kaycey2022 2y ago
At the risk of sounding very distasteful, you could always just ask one of the gippities to understand what a command does. Though this would be less painful, I suppose you would lose out on having to go through the man pages and learning how to navigate those effectively. I myself don't really like looking into the man pages for answers. I just go in there for confirming the answers.

by sieste 2y ago

exe34 2y ago

it's better if you try to work out what the commands and options are doing. I did this a long time ago, and 15 years later, I realise that it gave me a big advantage over my colleagues who haven't done something like that. "missing xxxxx.so" - they don't even know what that means, whereas I'm already trying to find the so and putting it in ld_library_path to see if it helps.

spockz 2y ago
In my experience, whenever a .so was missing it was either due to a missing package on the os package manager level, or a completely broken gcc or llvm setup. I never needed to explicitly add single .so files to a path. (Besides the use case where I specifically wanted to override a malloc implementation.) In which cases did/do you need to add individual files?
- exe34 2y ago
  in this case it's an in-house monstrosity that's got a lot of various languages and build systems involved, and the moment you update a compiler or build system, everything jumps into a new location for no good reasons. it was just an example though - same issue with .h not found during compilation, or using a different compiler from the system wide one.
- screcth 2y ago
  In my case, I work with proprietary EDA tools. Vendors love messing with LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Chaos ensues when they override a system library or two versions require mutually incompatible versions. I agree with the comment you are replying to. Having broken my home Linux installs too many times has taught me how to diagnose and fix this sort of issues.
- nmoura 2y ago
  In my case, when I was a Slackware user before Slackbuilds was created, sometimes I wanted to try out programs for which there was no package. Usually they required a .so file that was not installed and a workaround was to put it manually from a package of another distribution compiled for the same architecture. When the .so file was there, but on another path, a symbolic link was sufficient. The ldd command was a good friend. Of course that was not the best and cleanest solution, having things outside the package management system bothered, but it was enough to experiment programs and I kept track of the changes so I could have the prior state of things. Later on, the Slackbuilds project eased the work and I contributed by writing code to automate the creation of a few packages. I learned a lot from these issues.

keyle 2y ago

Yep, basically. At some point you realise you could do it, but do you really want to go through it all... It's a slog. It is a fun experience though!

stavros 2y ago
> It's a slog. It is a fun experience though! Aren't those two opposites?
- wezdog1 2y ago
  Type 2 fun
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  You've never experienced effort as fun? That is... not flattering.
  - stavros 2y ago
    Effort, yes. Slog, no.
- whartung 2y ago
  I have a saying for this: An "adventure" is a bad trip, remembered fondly.

pushupentry1219 2y ago

When I was in highschool I had a bunch of free time outside of school days. I used a YouTube guide to install Arch. I failed many many times. But in doing so I almost kind of learnt what each command was doing. I had the same experience when I installed Gentoo. In both cases at first I was copy/pasting commands, but through failure I ended up understanding a lot of what the commands did. And what someone else said below is true as well, actually try and force yourself to understand what you're typing. Even briefly just scanning a man page helps a lot.

bee_rider 2y ago
I wonder if the wiki would have been an easier start, than YouTube. YouTube is nice for learning things with a visual component, but installing Linux is all text, all the time. The ability to easily hop around and re-read sections on the wiki where necessary (I mean, jumping around is possible on YouTube of course, but it is really easy on the wiki) seem like it would be a big help.
- pino82 2y ago
  Reading and actually understanding non-trivial text is hard if you are part of a generation that was never challenged to actually learn it. For those people, YouTube (and a few similar shops) are the default way to consume any content. That's what they do all the time. Sure, they somehow know those legacy emojis that you call the latin alphabet. It will just not lead to a deep understanding of text. Another aspect is probably that watching YT clips always has a feeling of being part of something. Some movement, some bubble, some society, whatever. They don't install Arch bcs they want to learn sth, or make some use of the OS. They do it _because_ they found it on YT and they want to be part of it. Maybe they even write comments or make a 'reaction' video. Today it's Arch, tomorrow it's a special pizza recipe from that other guy on Insta. It doesn't really matter.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I dunno. I’m a millennial so all sorts of stuff was just ascribed to my generation. As a result, I tend to just assume these differences are overstated. I worked with college students fairly recently. They did often reach reflexively for video. But when the written material was good enough, they used it.

pipes 2y ago

Yes this and endlessly unzipping things. I gave up after many many hours. I doubt I learned much from it.

kwanbix 2y ago

Same for me. I tried it about 20 years ago. I didn't fell like I was learning anything, just copy paste like you say. I haven't retried since, but I think it would be much better if they explain what you are doing and why.

rwalle 2y ago

Haven't tried it, but I guess if you were doing this again today, ChatGPT would help a lot.

vbezhenar 2y ago

I built my LFS around 20 years ago. While I followed instructions most of the time, I built some components myself. I remember that I wrote by own init scripts and I think I wrote my own initramfs (not completely sure about it, but I definitely remember tinkering with it and it probably was LFS). I also wanted to implement an isolated build system and my own package manager (basically tar wrapper with file database to be able to uninstall, no fancy dependency stuff), but containers were not invented back then and my skills were not good enough to properly utilize fakeroot, so it never was implemented, although I spent some time experimenting. Today I would do it with docker, exciting time.

johnisgood 2y ago
Wanting to (and doing it) make my own package manager because of LFS and minimalism in general, good times.

noufalibrahim 2y ago

I haven't tried this but I have used https://github.com/MichielDerhaeg/build-linux https://github.com/MichielDerhaeg/build-linux during my trainings and all my students quite enjoyed the experience. It basically builds a Kernel, libc, busybox, init etc. and gets the whole thing running inside qemu. I found it quite educational and worth the little time I spent on it.

sheepybloke 2y ago
I agree! I find systems like OpenEmbedded's Yocto to be super helpful with learning how to build Linux.

zvmaz 2y ago

> Did anyone experience the same? I tried several times, and tried again just recently. I share your sentiment. It perhaps gave me a renewed appreciation of the huge benefits Linux ditributions and package managers give us.

notorandit 2y ago

Nope. I never execute commands without understanding its meaning. Maybe you expect to complete a LFS installation in very little time. Which cannot be the case in general and in this very case in particular

kobalsky 2y ago

I grabbed a random page from the manual: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/chapter05/gcc-pass1.html https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/cha... Every step is explained and every used parameter is documented.

andrewmcwatters 2y ago
You grabbed a random page.
ruszki 2y ago
I would say "explained". As a layman, who worked with linux previously (and even tried LFS a long time ago), but definitely don't have a deep understanding of linux, and eve my knowledge is not up-to-date: The sed command is not explained at all. Even the description is non-sense if you don't know already what they are talking about. What is this "default directory", why do you need to set it, why there and only there, why that command works? Even the command itself is something, which I need to check the manual what the heck it does, because it's not a simple one. > -enable-default-pie and --enable-default-ssp The description is almost unusable. So we don't need it, but it's "cleaner", which in this context means exactly nothing. So what happens if I left out? Nothing? Then why should I care? > --disable-multilib Okay, it doesn't support "something". I have no idea what is multilib, or why I should care. Basically the next arguments' description tells me that because it wouldn't work the compilation otherwise. And then.. > --disable-threads, --disable-libatomic, --disable-libgomp, --disable-libquadmath, --disable-libssp, --disable-libvtv, --disable-libstdcxx But why would they fail? I want to understand what's happening here, and I need to blindly trust the manual because they just tell me, that "they won't work, believe us". > --enable-languages=c,c++ Why are these the only languages which we need? What are the other languages? So at the end, descriptions are not really helping to understand what's happening, if you don't know already. The last time when I started LFS (about 10 years ago), that was my main problem. That you already need to know almost everything to understand what's really happening, and why, or reading manuals, or trying to find basically unsearchable information (like why libatomic compiling would fail at this step). So after a while, I started the blind copy-pasting, because I didn't have the patience of literary months, and when I realized that this was pointless, I gave up.

aflukasz 2y ago

It feels to me like you have approached this with a wrong mindset, like you focused too much on finishing the whole process. With LFS you must put substantial amount of value into the journey itself. It's not about copy-pasting commands, it's about trying to actually understand what and, more importantly, why your are doing each step. My recollection is that LFS docs were good in helping with that. Or maybe it was coming from reading docs of the actual components as I went along? I don't remember, probably some mix of both. I did set LFS system up once, I think it was 2001 or 2002. I specifically remember that it took many days (due to compilation times), was very interesting, and at the end I was putting final touches to my mutt and slrn configs. With a vague memory that I had some TODO for mutt that I didn't finish, still lingering in my mind, apparently! :) All in all, great and satisfying learning experience. I would not use such system as a daily driver, though. I think it's good only if you have time and want to learn. I'm curious if someone here is brave enough to have different approach.

oorza 2y ago
LFS to a computer scientist should be like soap to a chemist. Something you can do as a fun, educational experiment, but not where you source a necessary tool for your life.
NegativeK 2y ago
I daily drove it for a few months, back in the early 2000s (like many in this thread, it seems.) I kept it updated by subscribing to Freshmeat emails for releases, and I'd download and install the tarball. My review is that I'm glad I did it, it's a terrible idea, and it's debatable (honestly, not facetiously) as to whether the classes I skipped were more valuable.

mnahkies 2y ago

Last time I tried (probably well over 10 years ago) I struggled more with how long stuff took to compile. The main learning I remember from it was the chroot concept, which then later helped me grasp containerization easier

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Nope. It's a launchpad not meant solely to follow blindly. The point is trial and error experimentation along the way. Can I switch the order of these packages or enable dependency X? It also helps to have a fast x86_64 box with zillions of cores and plenty of RAM and SSD, and also a compiler cache like sccache to speed up rebuilds.

sweeter 2y ago

Yes. I got a little bit out of it, certainly, but it really is mostly an exercise of compiling packages. I was a little disappointed but in the end LFS inspired me to take on a rewrite of the Unix Coreutils in Golang. I learned far more about Unix systems from doing this than anything else. It also improved my skills a lot, I look back on some of this code and cringe a little bit. [1] https://github.com/sweetbbak/go-moreutils https://github.com/sweetbbak/go-moreutils

donio 2y ago

For most people the whole reason to do the exercise is to understand what is involved in a bootstrap process. When you don't understand something you stop and figure out what is going on. There is not much point in blindly running commands that you don't understand.

lanstin 2y ago
Except of course getting the OS installed and running.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kaycey2022 2y ago

At the risk of sounding very distasteful, you could always just ask one of the gippities to understand what a command does. Though this would be less painful, I suppose you would lose out on having to go through the man pages and learning how to navigate those effectively. I myself don't really like looking into the man pages for answers. I just go in there for confirming the answers.