#linux from scratch

[distrochooser]

Currently installing LFS on an eMachine from 2007 just to feel something.

[zeckma]

autism

(lfs w/ glibc-2.39 and mixed version of packages to ensure a proper working system, plus wifi access [no gnat/gcc-ada or mingw-w64 quite yet], and i streamed it all on my youtube channel)

[felitgechipmunk]

i have done it

the linux flavored linux lives now

[rhinorapscallion]

I may or may not have found a Linux distribution that, instead of giving you an installer or liveISO to install from, it gives you a PDF telling you how to install everything from scratch, compiled from source.

I’m about to lose a sizable portion of my free time.

[kotodama-catalogue]

i've been on a linux adventure recently —

one day i woke up and thought, "today is the day", and began working through the linux from scratch handbook. it turns out that most people do not in fact do this on bare metal because compiling everything yourself and just punting on package management does not provide for a workable system. at least, not as a daily driver. (this guy tried writing a debian from scratch where step 1 is getting apt going, but apparently it is not just outdated, but incorrect even at the version specified).

you're supposed to just do this in a virtual machine and treat it like a learning exercise. i did not do this, and spent twelve hours compiling all the packages and walking circular dependency trees basically trying to slowly divorce yourself from the host system's toolchain.

in the process it's very clear how "down in the dirt" linux as a whole is; nothing is made for each other, all the packages are just picked up from here and there, sometimes the maintainer doesn't update their domain and pkg-conf is just Gone so you have to dig it out of the gentoo repo. i kind of love it. it feels organic, it feels natural. of course this emerged. of course it all kinda works, of course it all fails easily.

it's a lot like the human body. that is, say you have a really nicely integrated distro. they probably have like fifty different upstreams, and teams that are making extensions or monkey patching the upstream as they go to slowly hone these disparate things into stuff that vaguely resembles each other. you introduce redundancies and reliability checks. you try to migrate to stuff that will enforce this (Ubuntu enforces Wayland by default; Fedora defaults you to btrfs; downstream distributions then in turn undo some of these like how Pop! OS goes back to X11).

you keep reinforcing against common failures with subsequent processes that can watch for those failures and prevent them, provide fallbacks, self-heal if possible.

and then in turn for everything else you isolate its ability to even impact the core system. ideally you're immutable — say, vanilla os, or some people use nix or fedora silverblue. but most of the time there's just a hybrid approach where we sandbox as much as we can. steam os completely replaces the OS every update and keeps the home folder. chromebooks do likewise. macos has been doing this since i think el capitan? and apfs is intended to have a less hacked-in way of providing for a core system partition that nothing else can touch.

that whole thing is really beautiful, i think — have BSDs replicated this? i don't know; i have never used one very seriously. it felt like they intended to start from scratch with a monolithic basis, but it feels like i'm in the early 2000s again when i try to debug a bsd system and look for documentation.

anyway, so after twelve hours i fumbled a very basic thing. that is, i assumed, why not? i will use UEFI, but i had already partitioned as if i was doing an MBR. so i tried to add a UEFI partition and inadvertently, in trying to unmount and safely perform this operation, rebooted into a system that was freaking out because there was no UEFI partition. it kept reboot cycling into a wifi recovery agent and occasionally realising there was a USB attached.

i moved to arch and performed the entire install in like less than an hour. but damn it, now i'm frustrated. i wanted to see this through. today i decided to move to fedora to better have an overarching experience for this specific hardware (the auto-rotation and on screen keyboard support is amazing on gnome 44) and then try to throw all this into a Box and do it again. but given so much of this was tedious, i would probably just ... automate it. but aren't we getting too close to just a distro?

[rioboyva2554]

I've finally finished my LFS distro

[distracteddaintydemon]

I'm eager to start my first Linux From Scratch project.

I'm also eager for my 4-days streak of probably mild migraines to end, or for finding a combination of routines and medications that will keep these buggers down enough so I could reliably cosplay able-bodied person.

I'm also happily waiting to find how similar these two processes are. Deciding on remedials feels VERY MUCH like debugging and solving dependencies.

"You can manage migraines with ibuprofen, but it will fuck up your stomach lining if you use it more than few days a month, but you can patch this effect if you'll add proton-pump inhibitor to Daily Morning Meds, but if you're using proton-pump inhibitor all the Modified Release meds are reverted to standard versions, so if you rely on this effect for some of your meds you need either a Manual Modified Release (i.e. half a pill twice a day) or an Advanced Modified Release. Oh and ibuprofen taken regularly can mask inflammation sources, so remember about it while doing maintenance..."

Tell me it isn't debugging and detangling packages. Say it to my face. I love Linux because it allows me to live in utopia where there are manuals for low-lovel non-standard shit and the only thing limiting me are my intelligence and determination.

[linuxiarzepl]

LFS 12.0

Została wydana nowa wersja otwarto-źródłowej książki Linux From Scratch 12.0 https://linuxiarze.pl/linux-from-scratch-12-0/

[tsubakicraft]

冬の間に

手仕事系モノづくりの作業がひと段落したので、ルーチンの作業をやりながら、冬の間にいくつかやっておきたいと思っています。 モノづくり共同体はコメづくりモノづくりを広範囲に実践する有志集団です。 鉄と石油の時代だった20世紀からシリコンの時代に変わってきました。鉄鋼生産量はだいぶ前に頭打ちになり、シリコンの生産量が増加しています。企業番付を見ても日本企業が好調だった30年前と今では顔ぶれが変わり、上位にはIT系企業が並んでいます。 モノづくりというと鑿や鉋で木を削ったり、旋盤で金属を削ったりする手仕事や伝統工芸のような手仕事をイメージする方は多いかもしれませんが、現代のモノづくりにコンピューター技術は欠かせませんから、旧来のモノづくりに加えて現代的な要素も身に付ける必要があると思います。 時々「拘りの職人技」みたいな文言を見ますけれど、モノづくりって拘りが無い方が良いと思うんですよね…

[zeckma]

Why, yes, I'm a Linux user! How'd you know?

[felitgechipmunk]

beware

im going to make

a zombie

the lfs livecd shall live again

[reesedragon]

"The way you were taught every notion about society is wrong, and if you don't unlearn it, you are a bad person"

And

"Unlearning an old thing to relearn a new thing is a special hell challenge for neurodivergents, especially lower functioning ones"

These statements are true on the same Earth and it sure is a something, isn't it?

[natequarter]

the thing that super techy people - whether that be linux nerds or actual software developers or both - tend to miss is that most people, if a form of technology works as default, won't bother tinkering around with that default. nobody wants to compile all their apps from scratch except a small minority of people. and most people, to be frank, don't wholly understand what they're working with. if word works, they're not going to switch to some open source equivalent that they had to download and set up and fiddle around with. if windows works, they're not going to download linux. they don't want to. they probably don't even know linux is an option, and even if they did, they still wouldn't move to linux. and you can list the benefits of linux and drawbacks of mac os until the sun goes down, but you're not going to persuade the average person, because they just aren't invested enough in their technology! this is why nobody moves away from windows even when it's spying on you and sticking ai in everything and costs $34567890 and your firstborn son: they don't know any better, or they don't have the time to change, or they don't care, or they just, quite simply, don't understand their computer enough to take a risk with software that may not be so easy to use. and i understand this! it's great if you can code, but it's a skill just as much as writing or skating is - something most people are never going to sink much of their time into, no matter how much you personally love it. so if you want people to change their ways, you need to hold your hand, you need to listen to them, and you need to give something that will just work. otherwise, they'll see you as a hindrance - not a help.

[ubuntu-official]

Bitches be like "Linux from scratch sucks" my brother in christ YOU made the operating system.

[silly-gizmo]

About myself! 🐾

Previously: @solsticepony

Includes Info / BYI at the bottom Hi I'm Neli you can refer to me with she/fae pronouns! :D I am currently still trying to figure out a lot of things like my gender identity, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, preferred names, hobbies, etc. I'm potentially asexual I think? Stuff in this about me might get updated/changed sometimes so keep that in mind! Here is my art! | Here is my discord server | Here is my strawpage

Blocked immediately Pedos/zoos Icky NFTs/AI generated media

Here is some stuff about myself!

I have interests in plushies, video games, computers, retro video games and systems, lost media, retro hardware and collecting.

I have plushies, some retro games and systems (mostly Nintendo ones), a Nintendo Switch along with switch games both physical and digital I don't usually have switch online.

I usually play Minecraft both Bedrock and Java and sometimes ROBLOX but I don't support the corporation and I have a negative stance on it. I have played Regretevator, Be a wobbledog and Flavor Frenzy on there before.

You can find me on Discord, Scratch, Roblox and Steam you can ask for them but only if I have seen or interacted with you before! I have Minecraft and Ponytown so you can ask if you want to play with me if you want

I use Linux I currently use Debian 12 with KDE, I do have a laptop with Windows 11 to run Windows applications. They aren't the greatest hardware so they struggle sometimes running the games listed above.

I have played OneShot: World Machine Edition, a little bit of Rain World, Celeste, Slime Rancher: Plortable Edition, Wandersong, Terraria, Undertale, Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition and Half Life I have not completed any of these games and might not have gotten far in them yet! I have finished chapter 1 of Deltarune before though!

I have watched all the episodes of TADC (The Amazing Digital Circus on YouTube) and Murder Drones as of June 2024.

Info / BYI

Reblogs/Posts

Anything that's considered explicit | No | Hate speech | No

Art requests

Suggestive/lewd/sexual/anything that's considered explicit | No | Art involving hate towards any group | No

No

Likes/RBs on posts from MDNI/18+ only accounts | No

Yes

Spam likes/RBs | Yes | Anon/Non-anon asks | Yes | Mentioning me in posts | Yes | Interacting with me | Yes | DMs | Yes

[techav]

On Boot Failures

Headlines everywhere on Friday, the 19th of July, 2024 were about the massive computer outages caused by a faulty update to the CrowdStrike antivirus software. It seems some config file choked up a kernel module causing Windows machines to fail with the infamous Blue Screen of Death.

I recently started a new job and was perhaps a little smug in the fact that in my new job I am no longer responsible for hundreds of endpoints running CrowdStrike.

Karma's a bitch though.

I shut down my home PC Friday night to install a memory upgrade and after powering it back on I was met with the very same Blue Screen of Death.

"A critical process died" it told me, with no information about what said process actually was.

And no log files.

And no dump files.

System Restore failed. sfc /scannow failed. dism /cleanup-image failed. Everything I could find failed. I couldn't even just reinstall Windows over the existing installation because apparently that requires being already booted into the OS that currently isn't running.

The log files from dism led me to believe the problem might be related to registry corruption, but my attempts at replacing system registry files with clean ones from an install wim were not successful.

I was grasping at straws. Starting from scratch with a clean install is daunting and would have set me back weeks. I was contemplating pulling out an old SSD and just running with Linux Mint for a while.

Through desperation, I downloaded Hiren's BootCD PE so I could poke around a little more. None of the tools included there were able to resolve the issue either, but just having access to a standard Explorer shell and a web browser helped.

Finally I came across ShadowCopyView, a program that can explore the System Restore images that Windows (can) take regularly. In one last desperate effort, I moved out all of the system registry files from C:\Windows\System32\config and used ShadowCopyView to replace them with copies from an automatic restore point the previous Monday.

That actually did the trick. I was able to reboot into my primary Windows partition and sign in like normal.

I have no idea what may have been lost in a few days of registry updates, and I have no idea what may have caused the problem to begin with. But I am happy I was able to find something in the end that would get me back into my system without having to reinstall everything from scratch.

... Although maybe I should anyway.

And should anyone encounter something similar in the future, these were the kind of errors I was seeing that a Google search wasn't really coming up with anything useful:

dism.log: failed to open registry root

dism.log: failed to query for path to user profiles directory

dism.log: failed to load the default user profile registry hive

dism.log: failed to load offline store from boot directory

srttrail.txt: pending package install

strtrail.txt: boot manager generic failure