Well, I got through the 4.1 book.
Got counted.
Got rebooted into LFS.

Thanks for the help so far!!

Now, if you've ever played 'Serious Sam - The Second Encounter' you know how I feel. I just killed off 100 bad guys and went through the next door. It's quiet. There is a health and an armor floating in the middle of the room.

I know that once I grab them, 25 pumpkin headed, chainsaw totin' baddies are gonna come out of the walls and start attacking.

Can't think about that... Gotta focus on the mission...

Same here I too got through the 4.1 book and got counted..
The blfs book isn't as good as lfs to be truthfull but it works

I got some stuff to work gpm, random numbers, links (nice text browser)

Then I wanted to do something different, since this my distribution with my rules, I wanted to substitute XF86 with something slimmer less ugly.
This when all hell broke loose..!
I got as far as running mplayer in vesa framebuffer (nice) and in native geforce framebuffer 640*480 resolution only amd also some of the demos for directfb, but I can't get the XdirectFB to work.. damn I hate X.
Any Ideas?

Yeah, when I finished the book the first time successfully (I think that was back with 2. something?), I busted out the backups! It was such a relief to have the fastest system on earth working and at my disposal. Shortly after, I scrapped it and have been looking back ever since Be sure to backup all your work at good 'restore' points guys.

As for 'any ideas' not really. That's the problem with using not-so-standard equipment/files/apps though. They might even be better, but you are going to be more hard pressed to find resolutions when things don't work out. In the end though, it'll make you a better linuxer.

Good Luck!

Cool

Hi,
I finished the 4.1 book. Except for the good laughing-at I got at lfs-support for buying an out-of-date book ( It was 6 months old, and pimped by cheapbytes), I didn't have too much trouble.
Now I have trouble. It has taken me several days to just get to the point where I can get online. The only way I knew how to add a user was with <vipw>. I am adding files as I discover I need them. .bashrc and .bash_profile were taken straight from debian. I spent a couple hours learning that an /etc/resolv.conf file helped DNS a lot.
Is this how everybody does it? I know I am not the brightest light in the night sky, but am I missing something? Shouldn't there be a second book? I have seen something about a cvs blfs book, but I think that does not apply to me. NO offense to the lfs folks (especially since I would like to consider myself one of them), but I think their's is a poorly organized site.
This is being posted with a debian machine. I guess I could try Links in the lfs box, but I'm not sure I have it set up right, and this post might end up qualifying me as a guest on the Jerry Springer show.
Am I the only one having these problems? Maybe macrame, and not linux is my long suit?
Thanks for any input.
David

Yeah, when I finished LFS the first time I felt satisfied and a little disillusioned at the same time. When they say you get a bare bones system, that is exactly what you get. That's precisely the reason a lot of people suggest that it's not for newbies (not that I'm suggesting you are). It's mostly geared to those who have played with software enough to know what they like, how it should be configured, and all that business: people with a game-plan in mind of what the final system will be before they even start the LFS book.

However, there is a group who has stepped up to help the more ambitious (read: fly-by-the-seat-of-our pants like you and me) with the BLFS book. You can access it from http://beyond.linuxfromscratch.org. The book was relatively recently released as 1.0, and you can view it online just like the LFS book. In fact, it is designed to look and feel very similar to the LFS book, and it provides you with the steps you need to flesh out your system some. I've personally used it to install XFree86, Gnome, Mozilla, and other pieces of software.

I would highly suggest taking a look at it. It's meant to be picked apart: you don't follow it from start to finish, but choose what packages you want on your system, and it does a decent job of listing the dependencies (and their installation instructions) for each package. There are some that they missed, but those problems aren't show stoppers. You'll get an error from the config script, download the needed dependency, install it, and continue on your way.

As for adding a user, when installing LFS, you installed an "adduser" or a "useradd" executable (I can never remember which). It would take care of the tedious tasks for you in account creation.

The BLFS book mentions setting up the global profile and bashrc files, as well as setting up your skeleton directory for new users (when created with the above utility).

I don't recall if it mentions the resolv.conf... I haven't had much need to look at the networking section because I remembered seeing resolv.conf mentioned on my Red Hat system.

Anyway, I would highly suggest checking out the BLFS book. I would NOT suggest printing it, because it's quite long...

Thank you very much indeed for the link. I must have passed by it a hundred times, and somehow kept ending up in the archives.
It doesn't bother me in the least to be a newbie, and since flying-by -the-seat-of-my-pants is at least flying, that doesn't upset me either.
Thanks again,
Dave

Hi again,
At last I have reached the place I wnted to get to from the beginning.
After tearing out my hair a couple of times and running in the street like a lunatic as well as some sleepless weeks (okay days).. I am there!

First of all I can't ephasize the importance of backups enough. Just log onto any other linux you have on the machine that can access the LFS partition and do this (if your tar has the -j patch and you have bzip2):
tar -cj $LFS >> bachup.tar.bz2
this should keep you safe in case you do something stupid to your system.

BLFS is a good book to read but only read.. it is rather weaker than the LFS book, besides not all of us want to install everything.. If that is what you want download a distro.
Right now my system is around 540Mb and I use it most of the time ( I rarely log onto redhat anymore).. Still some stuff to do but shouldn't be difficult.

I had to forget about the X substitute thing and chose to cut down on the window manager. So I choose XFCE which I have grown so fond of. Besides it's based on GTK which happens to be the backend for most of the good apps out there (at least gaim, mplayer, xmms, gvim, phoenix (or mozilla they are almost the same), gftp, xchat, d4x, xcdroast)..
Oh and i use XISP with Xforms for my dialup connection.

I know some people would recommend fluxbox among many others but the idea is that this lfs might be the way to convert some of my friends over from windows, so I need an interface that is user friendly ( read dead brain user ). Personally I like the console.

I am still looking for a good terminal emulator that has all the features and doesn't require a few hundred megabytes of libraries to work.

I know how you feel - it was the same for me. But after picking the - for me - important things out of blfs, I just was happy. Fast, stable, and all done by myself :-)

But, what I wanted to mention: there is another really great page that helps you not only to install new software as blfs does, it also helps you with configuration issues. I talk about hints.linuxfromscratch.org where a lot of people have written hints (me too) to help other users get their system configured

citro