Andy Chase

Over the last few weeks I've been working on building a Linux From Scratch system on an empty partition of my desktop machine... partly because it's an interesting process and partly because I want to get in the habit of using Linux on the desktop more than I do.



Building my own Linux system from the ground up with everything compiled natively on my own hardware will (in theory) result in a lean, mean OS that will be free of all the bloat that winds up in a distro like Mandrake or Red Hat (not to fault either of those fine companies; if not for Mandrake and Red Hat, I wouldn't be anywhere near as familiar with Linux as I am today.) I'll probably install a window manager like Enlightenment rather than a full "Desktop Environment" like GNOME or KDE; they still run somewhat slowly compared to Windows.



Anyway, this morning I finally got my LFS Kernel compiled correctly after two misfires - the first time I forgot to compile support for ReiserFS into the kernel. Seeing as my root partition is ReiserFS-formatted, that was a problem. On my second attempt I included ReiserFS support (Note: You have to enable the 'experimental' features during configuration in order to add ReiserFS support - otherwise it won't show up as an option in the Filesystems section of the kernel config), but the kernel image wound up being quite large because I chose to compile everything directly into the kernel rather than use modules. The system crashed before it could even load the whole kernel.



The third time was a charm; I changed some of the kernel compenents to load as modules, made sure to include ReiserFS, recompiled, and rebooted.



I'm not sure if the error messages I get when booting up my new system are due to my having chosen to use ReiserFS instead of the standard Ext2FS (the LFS documentation is light on the ReiserFS details), or if I'm missing something else in my boot scripts. Some interfaces (most notably Ethernet) aren't loading correctly... but after wading through all those error messages, I did finally get my custom

"Welcome to Greyledge Linux"

login prompt, which I have to say is pretty damn cool.



I was able to log in and cruise around the file system a bit, but that was about it. I don't know if I'm up to debugging those boot errors today, and I'm almost inclined to wipe the partition and start from scratch using Ext2FS this time around, as much as I prefer ReiserFS.



Nevertheless, building your own OS from source is a pretty neat thing, and as many components as there are it's not surprising that there would be a few problems here and there on my first attempt.