Linux from scratch

@xiopher:

I have been wondering if any one on a linode decided to do a LFS distribution "just for grins”.

This is the type of thing I do once I get some new hardware for a linux box. It is also a great way to see how fast and robust your hardware setup is :roll: .

Has any one tried this with their Linode?

How long did it take to fully install the system?

Was it better/worse than the debian system we all know and love

–-
if you want to learn linux, i highly recommend lfs.

compared to debian, it's been years since I did lfs, but I still think it was probably the best performing system I've had (just not very maintainable).

as far as on a linode… i hope you have a yearly plan cause you'll need it with the io limiter :)

kenny

I haven't done LFS on a Linode yet, but I have done a Gentoo stage one install on a Linode 64, which puts the same kind of load on the machine during the system build.

@kenny:

i hope you have a yearly plan cause you'll need it with the io limiter

I built the whole thing (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postfix, Courier-IMAP) in about four days, leaving the big jobs to run overnight. The problem I ran into was the io limiter kicking in while linking glibc. Things got slow because my limiter values were reduced. I had to get caker to reset them, otherwise the link would have taken tens of hours.

edited: typos

I compiled my own system more or less according to the LFS/BLFS books a year ago come November. I don't remember exactly how long it took, but a few days to a week max, mostly because I was doing it intermittently between other things and only have a 56kbps modem connection over slow phone lines, so I'd download a few packages, script the compiles, then check back in hours or days later, adjust for any problems in my scripts or the compiles, and repeat until the whole system was built. Since then, I've updated many pacakages, and the only real problems I noticed were related to the io limits - untarring and/or building some packages eat up the io tokens real quick, causing bad delays in the web and mail servers. However, since I rebooted a month or so ago and found the max tokens increased to 40000 from something much smaller prior to that, this has been less of an issue though some sort of io "nice" feature would still really be welcome.

Anyway, I love my LFS "distribution" because I know exactly what's there and why it's there, and, despite having not deleted any of the documentation, I thinks it's still smaller than most if not all of the prepackaged linode distros.

hth

thanks for the replys

i think I will try the sutomated lfs with sleep timers to help with the io