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Linux from Scratch
- Celeo 11d agoFrom the news page: > Bruce Dubbs - 2026/09/01 > The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 13.1.
- halyconWays 11d agoI 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
- lukeify 11d agoYou 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.
- partyficial 11d agoit's like their brain is unaware of the concept of a timeline
- mrleinad 11d agoSo Linux users are by definition, eternal.
- khantto 11d ago[dead]
- boomlinde 11d agoTook me half a second to realize I would probably start with "LFS :: Linux From Scratch is the main book, the base from which all other projects are derived."
- lukeify 11d agoYou mean the link to a page which _also_ doesn't have the main book?
- bbg2401 11d agoIt's a link to the project page for the main book and it does a good job of explaining itself and the available resources. I guess the biggest issue is it's not immediately obvious the left navigation menu changes between the project and subproject landing pages.
- voxelghost 11d agoIt is indeed glorious.
- esseph 11d ago... At the top? You're expected to read all of it! :)
- myaccountonhn 11d agoMy journey was: Start off by clicking LFS among the links, and then "Read online" in the sidebar, and then being lost. I see a header, "Current Stable" but I can't see the link to the actual book. I only see the errata, the security advisory and a link labelled... stable LFS systemd? Maybe it's that one? Yes, yes it is.
- austy69 11d agoIdk what to tell you if the “welcome to Linux from scratch” header wasn’t enough of a hint
- fourside 11d agoI thought the parent comment was missing something obvious too but if you click the top link in that section, it’s a page describing LFS but without linking to its content. Then I clicked the “Read online” link on the menu on the left, but the top links are errata and security advisories and then the main link. Not the worst navigation I’ve seen but the parent comment does have a point.
- lrvick 11d agoWe did that, but in containers. https://stagex.tools/ https://stagex.tools/
- rrampage 11d agoInteresting project. Why does it use LLVM toolchain when it already builds gcc in an earlier stage?
- lrvick 11d agoLLVM is a much more mature and modern compiler by basically every measure, and importantly, a native cross compiler unlike GCC. One copy of LLVM can build for many architectures vs needing one GCC toolchain for every architecture you wish to target. Also modern languages like rust require LLVM so we need it anyway, and the kernel has rust now, so why not make the most mature compiler stack the global default? Using two different compilers for the kernel would be begging for problems. I am most optimistic for the Fil-C fork of LLVM being a default some day where we get compile time memory safety too. We do maintain gcc in tree for legacy languages like Fortran though.
- lioeters 11d agoIf I understand correctly, I think they build an older version of gcc using tcc (Tiny C Compiler by Bellard); then using that to build newer versions incrementally until they get to the modern stack with LLVM.
- aboardRat4 11d agoWhat's the news? This manual has been with us since forever.
- steve-atx-7600 11d agoI'm glad to see its still being maintained after more than 25 years since I last used it.
- cpach 11d agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708089
- bmenrigh 11d agoFor 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.
- rando103747202 11d agoLFS 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.
- r3trohack3r 11d agoI liked KISS for this It was like automated LFS from git FreeBSD’s Makefile system is also in this ballpark
- gigatexal 11d agoCompiling the packages doesn’t teach much it’s all the glue in between. No? It’s the startup scripts and the configs and creating a kernel and all the things. It’s on my list of things to do when I have some free time
- binarin 11d agoI've learned the most from LFS long time ago, when I had no internet. I had a mismatching set of Slackware and redhat source CDs, and LFS itself didn't match the versions on CDs too. Since then I can build anything and anywhere, even if it's not cooperating :)
- self_awareness 11d agoYou know, you could also just read about each step to learn more. I mean if you feel you're following a baking recipe, you can just... read about it more. And then have LFS as a simple way to experiment if you want to change anything or not. Also, technically you don't need to have a bootloader installed on your main hard drive if you already have it on another disk. I mean, eh... last time I checked, this was Hacker news. Yesterday, there was an Ask HN topic on how to enable dark mode on HN. Is this the new hacker culture? Complaining that the resources merely point in some direction instead of specifying details?
- lioeters 11d agoList of (not all Linux) distributions that can be bootstrapped from source: https://github.com/vasi/bootstrappable-distros https://github.com/vasi/bootstrappable-distros
- haunter 11d agoThe last release of the no longer maintained sysvinit version is here (the default is systemd now) https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/12.4/ https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/12.4/
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- cientifico 11d agoThe fastest way to learn and remember what Linux is about
- bellowsgulch 11d agoLFS 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.
- charcircuit 11d agoThis 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.
- nandanadileep29 11d agoThe best way to learn linux !
- aa-jv 11d agoI do LFS every year, just to keep the chops sharp. It has been an immensely invaluable means of keeping informed with the way things are rolling in the Linux world.
- dat999zx 11d agoConfirmed Linux user with the good ol 2000 web style. Great job!
- utopiah 11d agoDidn'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?
- cmrx64 11d agoI 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)
- L4XB 11d agoVery cool; good Job!
- shevy-java 11d agoLFS is great. Unfortunately nowadays I often fail to compile it; most recently with GCC complaining and failing at options.cc. But I also get more issues here. I kind of need a LFS variant that is more flexible. For instance, the part up to having a working standalone compiler, should ideally become more robust and/or decoupled from the actual LFS build process. Once I have a sane toolchain, the rest is trivial, ruby scripts solve that part for me. But the build up towards that is not so reliable. Things also fluctuate so much in the build process; I still need perl for instance, and python wants to add more and more complexity into the build system as well, even though meson/ninja is a nice combo. For some reason, the build situation on Linux is not very elegant to word this nicely. Then we also "now you need LLVM and glslang and spirv" and so forth, and so on. The complexity always increases. To some extent I can understand why slackware crumbled. How can a single person, even with scripts, keep that all working?
- IslandRebel 11d agoLFS is worth doing if you are interested in learning how Linux distro is put together. There is a fair bit of reading involved. I did the entire thing in a Debian VM.
- not-so-darkstar 11d ago[dead]
- _superposition_ 11d agoThe OG
- B4st144n 11d agoI m very happy I started years ago with Gentoo which is also from scratch but with a package manager ones your system is up ( couple of days). You learn so much just starting from zero and understand choices you can make on that journey. In the end I stopped using it though, way later when the Gentoo hype was over though. Getting stuck into dependency loops wasn't productive anymore.
- ammmir 11d agoI remember using LFS’ predecessors to build 1.44MB “rescue” floppy disks with Linux 2.0 in the 1990s. Tweak the config so it could fit on there along with a small userland. I don’t even remember if busybox was around back then. It used to be a teenager’s rite of passage to build your kernel config, figure out LILO (remember that, pre-grub!), ipchains.. talk about feeling old!
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- Marchant_hq 11d agoStill remember the first time LFS booted. Felt like a true wizard, even if it was just a shell.
- i_am_a_peasant 11d agoI kind of gained all the benefits of LFS by just maintaining a yocto embedded linux distribution at my first job for a couple of years. Yocto is basically automated LFS, it will compile a cross toolchain then use that cross toolchain to compile everything for your target system.
- tugback 11d agoThat was a weekend project once, absolutely grueling but you learn so much about the OS internals.
- timw4mail 11d agoIn my experience with Gentoo, the hard stuff is well beyond the base setup: it's getting sound, bluetooth, auto-mounting, etc. setup the way it is in the bigger distros.
- phlipski 11d agoAbout 4 years after beating my head against the wall trying to learn all about embedded linux builds and reading through yocto docs, I found a course on Udemy titled, "Embedded Linux Step by Step Using Beaglebone Black" It was perfect for walking me through the kernel, file-systems, boot-loaders, etc... It was a bit dated even then and thus required a little leg work to find the proper source versions of linux for the beagle board but I got it all working and cross-compiled a linux distro from scratch for the beagle board, flashed it, booted it and talked to it via serial port. I highly recommend the course.
- nobleach 11d agoFor me, BSD and Portage was my intro to "you're gonna need to learn how to compile stuff". But Gentoo Stage 1 was my real intro into how to bootstrap Linux. I had been using it for about 6 years at that point. (RedHat/Mandrake/TurboLinux/Caldera/Slackware/Debian-based stuff) Starting at nothing but a partitioned disk felt crazy. But I learned so much that not much in the Linux realm scares me these days. It made installing Arch back in 2011 a walk in the park.
- Dabbling_Dion 11d ago[dead]
- j117noai 9d agoFirst time hearing about LFS. Decided to give it a shot as a learning journey. So far it's been fun, I learned about a bunch of stuff, like what ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 does and why you should not delete it on your host machine when trying to create the cross-toolchain