LFS part 2
May 2020 (634 Words, 4 Minutes)
Happy Quarantine everyone! At least as of the writing of this post, I am still locked up by government decree, been this way for little more than a month. It Gives me time for LFS, I supposeI hate it, please send help .
So on with the install, last time we left off we started chapter 3 of 9.1 LFS book, Packages and Patches.
At this point the book makes you create the directory $LFS/sources and make this directory writable and sticky as root. Then using the wget-list provided by the book to download the packages and patches. I’m so used to mirrorlists and repositories from other distros, but, of course, that isn’t how LFS works.
The results of the command in the $LFS/sources folder look like this:
The next step calls for the checking of each package with a provided md5sums file. I also have somewhat of a confession to make regarding this, I practically never check hashes of packages. I know, I know, that is pretty ill advised (anyone could have tampered with it and you wouldn’t notice!!!) so in the interest of good practice (honestly I really should start doing it), I’m doing so in this LFS install. All the checks passed ok, that’s my quick nod to security.
I’ve made the executive decision not to take any of the community patches just yet. I might highly regret that later, but I figure that if I ever need it I’ll get them when building the respective packages. I will also take a snapshot of my machine here. (don’t wanna lose my packages!)
That wraps up the third chapter of the book, It’s one of the shortest chapters, so I’m still going to do part of chapter 4 here too. Chapter 4 of LFS goes over final preparations before building the system. A temporary tool directory is supposed to be made at $LFS/tools made as root.
BUT, RECORD SCRATCH - FREEZE FRAME - I have seemed to run into my first issue! If you see the picture above, you might have caught that the /sources doesn’t seem to be at the $LFS directory, that is because even though $LFS is defined for my user, naidneelttil on the system, $LFS didn’t seem to be properly defined for root. In the first post I thought I had fixed this by defining $LFS in /root/.bash_profile, but it seems that the system only recognized it when I defined it in /etc/bash.bashrc.
So for the first time in this project, (but most likely not the last!) I’m going to revert back to an earlier snapshot (the one I made when I ended part 1) , and will define $LFS for root
Much better. I would like to point out that the LFS book does warn about this,
So, don’t be me and read the book properly! Always check, and do not assume things will work. For penance, I’m redoing Chapter 3 -
(And if you’re wondering, YES, I did redo the hash check, security is my ~passion~)
Wow, much better. Taking a snapshot here. Now onto Chapter 4 for real this time!
Now we are creating the $LFS/tools directory, and making a symlink to point /tools to mnt/lfs/tools.
Then the book asks you to make a new user called lfs to do all your installing under, as doing everything as root is pretty risky. This new lfs user gets ownership of $LFS/tools and $LFS/sources.
A ~/.bashrc and a ~/.bash_profile also needs to be made with configurations that isolate the new system from the host system and maks the environment suitable for building a linux system.
The book also advises that you could possibly speed up the build process of each package by taking advantage of multiple cores a system has by building with the command make -j2, I doubt that I can actually take advantage of this because I am running this on a virtual machine without multiple cores, but hey, on a physical machine or a vm with more cores this feature would be pretty useful. I’m a bit shocked by the whole idea of SBUs and standard compile times. Of course I’ve heard of this from afar, mainly people complaining about compiling packages in Gentoo, and now I get to experience it first hand! (eyyy, I did this to myself).
Okay, while 4.6, the last part in chapter 4 doesn’t have you do anything yet, it does inform you of Test Suites, which the book describes as “sanity checks” to make sure everything is compiled correctly. I can taste a bit of my future, this will be a pretty daunting process.
That’s everything from chapter 4, and I’ll end the post here and take a snapshot. I hope you found this useful, or at the very least entertaining.
-naidneelttil