From: Ken Jones <kjones@ziplink.net>
Have any us tried to build a Linux From Scratch?
I bought the book. I was disappointed in it. Its general form was: download all this stuff, type this, type this, now type this. There was not much discussion of why.
How did it go?
A few minutes of excitement that I had a new book. A couple hours of paging through the book with growing disappointment at how little could be learned by reading it. Probably you could learn more by actually doing it, and more importantly, by reading the documentation and code of the various packages as you build them. I began to think that I should go through the process in order to write a couple of chapters that would explain the overall plan, but maybe somebody else is already doing that. In any case it's not my high priority project. So the book sits quietly on my shelf.
Does anyone know of a college level course which uses this as part of its lab.?
No, I don't. I don't think such a lab would be worth much unless the professor had something specific to demonstrate by assigning a problem to make some changes, e.g. run on special hardware, boot into a special purpose program. Even then, there would probably be a better way to make the point than to build everything from scratch. There's not a lot to be learned by spending days watching compiler output scroll past. -- Keith