Building your own - no distro - anyone do this?

K

Kongar

Gawd
Joined
Oct 25, 2004
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753
WAAAAY back in like... 1994? I installed Linux on my Pentium so I could run school programs over my 2400 baud modem. I remember compiling the kernel and having to set every aspect of my hardware manually. I remember downloading like 20 floppies worth of install media just to get the basics up and running. It was brutally hard for me at the time, with many mistakes along the way. But in the end, I got it working (with X even!) and it was pretty cool running maple and matlab at home.

Does anyone do this anymore? As a "normal" home user? Just curious - I figured it'd be a good discussion topic if someone has done this. I got an Arch box up and running, and while it was certainly more customizable than say Ubuntu/Mint - it wasn't from scratch as I remember (dependency hell - shudder). I'm like old and stuff now, and windows gets the job done - but I still like to tinker. I'm thinking of trying it old school again - for no reason other than "why not"

Anyone crazy enough to do this and has some stories to share? :p
 
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

You;d probably want to start there - It's not *commonly* done anymore, but I'm betting back in '94, you weren't building your own non-distro, you were probably installing Slackware, SLS or similar. Recompiling your kernel back then was pretty common.
 
It was so long ago, I honestly don't even remember. It was "the school has Linux installation disks in this directory" and off we went. Maybe it was a distro after all. /shrug

It certainly was a challenge. I think it was about 3 months of tinkering before we got it all working (there was two of us doing it at the same time). I just remember editing so many damn text files trying to get it all to work.

Thanks for the link - I'm gonna check it out for the hell of it. See how many stupid mistakes I can make per night :D
 
Gentoo is about as close to LFS as I've gotten. The extreme manual labor nature of LFS doesn't appeal to me. I still compile every kernel update and handle many things manually, but I'm not interested in downloading the source of coreutils (or any other number of basic tools) and compiling that myself.
 
I'd second the Gentoo option. I use it on my server so I can just install what I want. And, I get to learn more about Linux.
 
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