These "notes" are designed to be used in addition to the instructions found in the LFS book. They are specially formulated to help you avoid many of the pitfalls first time LFS installers run into. They are predicated on the idea that you will be installing the system using a VM. For simplicity's sake, I am mandating that you must use VirtualBox as the virtualization software.
All of the "notes" together comprise an additional 30+ printed pages of help. Following the directions found in the notes and in the LFS book precisely is critical to successfully installing LFS.
Typographic Conventions In These Notes
There are several different conventions for how things are written in these notes. Pay special attention to what the different typographic formats are.
Commands to be entered into a terminal appear as follows. Each command is
written onto a single line. They are grouped together inside of gray boxes
like the one below. The example below would have you type into a terminal:
cd $LFS followed by ls followed by
pwd.
cd $LFS ls pwd
Occasionally, you will need to edit some files. The result of the edit will appear as below. Notice that the file's path is displayed at the top in the red header.
~/.bashrc
set +h
umask 022
LFS=/mnt/lfs
LC_ALL=POSIX
PATH=/tools/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
export LFS LC_ALL PATH
Rarely, I will need to inform you about the exact output of a command. This is usually done so you can manually check that a step was completed successfully. The command is the first line (in the gray box) and the commands output appears below it (in white). If your attention needs to be drawn to a specific area of the output it will be highlighted.
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/lfs-cd 1.5G 1.3G 197M 87% /
/dev/sda1 5.7G 140M 5.3G 3% /mnt/lfs
/dev/sda2 497M 19M 453M 4% /mnt/lfs/home
Another convention is how files, commands, and key board shortcuts are written. Below is a list of these conventions.
- Files and directories, like /etc, are written in monospaced font.
- Commands, like
ls, are written in a bold monospaced font. - Keyboard shorcuts, like Ctrl+C, are written using a comic style font.
Minimum System Requirements
Just like any other software an LFS install has minimum requirements it expects from the operating system. The requirements below are for the physical host machine.
- The host machine must have at least 2GB of RA.M
- You will need 8GB of free, portable, storage space.
- This LFS LiveCD ISO file. This is a custom Linux distribution created by me. It is based on Debian and is setup so that it has all the required software to build LFS.
- VirtualBox virtualization software.