> I'd say it's a lot more elementary that a Linux From Scratch build.
>
> I start with a base Debian CLI install. The first command I do after
> logging in for the first time is
>
> apt-get install kdm synaptic kdebase
>
> and go from there, installing packages with Synaptic.
Oh, that's a lot more advanced than Linux From Scratch. To get much
value with that, you need to make sure you have Synaptic set to only
download Required packages as if you're not careful, it'll download
Recommended packages automatically, increasing the functionality of
packages with no foresight from you.
In fact, what you're doing is little more than what I did in the 90's
when I got started in Debian. I downloaded the Debian netinstall CD,
installed it, then manually picked the packages to install. Of course,
back then I was using 'dselect', as Synaptic, aptitude, apt-get, even
meta-packages did not exist yet. (IIRC, the DEB packaging format
supported meta-packages, but they weren't used. I can't be sure of that
fact, as I didn't start making packages until much later.)
You may want to check out Aptitude sometime. It's the modern
ncurses-based packaging tool. It allows you to surf around the package
dependancies. That is, in addition to the descriptive text it not only
tells you about the Dependancies, Recommends, Suggests packages, it
also tells you about packages which Depend, Recommend or Suggest this
particular package.
With most GUIs you're stuck with the first of any pair of requirements.
For instance, most web-based CGIs Require "apache2 | httpd-cgi". That
is, in a GUI it will always simply install Apache httpd 2. However with
Aptitude you can expand that line and see every package which provides
either "apache2" or "httpd-cgi". (What would provide "apache2"? How
about any of the 3 current apache2-mpm-* packages -- each of these is a
different multi-processing module.)
With LFS, you start out in a (Linux) hosted environment and build your
target from scratch. Apparently, since I did it they include notes to
create the system from scratch using either their own (LFS) Live CD, or
your own Live CD (provided it includes a development environment).
With LFS the order that you install things matter, as you're compiling
everything from scratch. With autoconf things will successfully build
(simply with reduced functionality) if you fail to build things in the
right order. This also means that you can tweak the configurations of
every package in your system if you so choose. (Do you never use grep's
-P option? Then you don't need to link grep with libpcre.)
Cheers,
Steven Black
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