18 Nov 09 Building Linux From Scratch with Ubuntu 9.10 – Part 1

Before anything else

Building Linux from vacuum is a very hard, dangerous and satisfactory process. Four things can happen to you:

1) You end up accidentally deleting data from your hard disk

2) You end up with a useless pile of non-working binaries and source code sitting in your disk

3) You give up and call mom

4) And on very rare cases you end up with a barely working spartan linux setup to show to your friends that you won that war

It is up to you to make sure only step 4 happens. It will only depend on whats inside your skull.

What you will need

1) A working Linux distribution. In my case its the shiny Ubuntu 9.10 running inside Virtual Box. (I’ll explain my setup in the next topic)

2) About 6 GB free disk space (to be safe)

3) Lots of time and patience (from 2 to 31415 days, depending on your linux and learning skills)

4) Read this many times: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/

5) Luck (sometimes)

My setup and some life saving tips

I have only Windows XP installed in my laptop. It  has a virtualization software installed called Virtual Box. Using Virtual Box I installed Ubuntu 9.10 in a virtual drive that is actually only a large 8 GB file sitting in windows partition. You could install Ubuntu directly in your machine instead of installing it virtually, but virtualization gives us some huge benefits:

1) Virtual Box (could be VMWare or others) simulates a virtual computer. That means you can ruin the virtual OS (chances are big) without scratching the real OS.

2) You can read docs in the same PC because the host OS still works while you compile stuff.

3) VirtualBox can take snapshots of the virtual system at any state and restore them latter. That means you can save your progress and rollback if things go wrong (and they probably will).

4) You can run your LFS or continue a work in progress in any computer that has Virtual Box installed. Its just about copying the virtual machine from one PC to other.

5) You can take screenshots easier.

6) You can admire an OS (LFS) being built using an OS (Ubuntu) that is running inside an OS (Window XP in my case).

Getting Ubuntu 9.10 and the virtual disk ready

Before installing Ubuntu 9.10 in Virtual Box mind that during Ubuntu installation you will need to choose “Specify partitions manually” and create following partitions:

1. First partition: (this is where our LFS will be installed)
   • Type: Primary
   • Partition size: 8000 MB
   • Position: Beginning
   • Use as = “do not use the partition”
2. Second partition:
   • Type: Logical
   • Partition size: 500 MB is okay
   • Position: Beginning
   • Use as = “swap area”
3. Third and last partition:
   • Type: Primary
   • Partition size: All the space left on disk
   • Position: Beginning
   • Use as = “/”

Now that you know how to partition your virtual disk when installing Ubuntu 9.10 in Virtual Box, you can install it. I wont go through the process of installing Ubuntu 9.10 in Virtual Box because some people can do it better than me. But remember to choose “Specify partitions manually” during its setup.

Once Ubuntu 9.10 is installed

Now its time to prepare your brand new Ubuntu 9.10 with the tools needed to build LFS.

Continues soon…

Comments

1. Teguh | 04 Mar 2010 8:36 pm

   Hi, Bruno
   I am very exited reading you post, and I can’t wait for your Part 2 of this post. when will you post it?

2. Bruno | 05 Mar 2010 12:40 am

   Teguh,
   thank you! It’s a shame that I have left this post in the dust. I’ll find some time to continue this post!

   In the mean while, you can read the band new LFS 6.6 guide: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/6.6/

3. Teguh | 17 Mar 2010 4:26 am

   Ok, thanks for the tips, I will read carefully, because English is not my native language.
   I will build the OS for community purpose. can’t wait for next post Bruno.. great

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