OneAndOneIs2

As mentioned earlier, I installed Linux on somebody's laptop recently. Somebody who just wants to see what Linux is like, not somebody who knows much (or anything) about it.

I installed Ubuntu, in fact. And I was going to give a quick explanation of some of the differences. I was going to start with the "everything is a file that forms part of the one, single filesystem" thing. Then I stopped. Because in Ubuntu, when you put in a DVD, it doesn't (appear) to just become another part of the filesystem. It appears on the desktop as a separate disk. To explain what happens is actually quite complicated: It IS mounted as part of the filesystem, but it pretends it isn't.

So I just shut up and left her to it. I couldn't face explaining it. But it annoyed me.

Everything is a file. There is one filesystem, and everything is a part of it. This is a good thing, not something that should be hidden, or masqueraded as the windows-like multiple filesystems..

It made me suddenly very nostalgic for "proper" Linux. A Linux that doesn't hide things or pretend they're different from how they really are. A Linux that isn't all complicated GUIs trying to make things easier and actually just making them more complicated.

Oh yes they do. Put a DVD into an Ubuntu machine, then log out, log in as another user, and try to eject the disc. It won't work, because you're not the owner of the DVD filesystem that's been mounted in /media. The DVD shouldn't even be mounted, certainly not mounted by a specific user.

So I've got a spare partition, I thought I'd put a decent Linux distro on it to be an alternative to my current choices of Vista or Ubuntu. And Linux From Scratch seemed appealing.

But you need to install it from Linux and Ubuntu doesn't work with my laptop's wireless. So can't download the packages.

However, I know from the recent install that the latest version of Ubuntu is really good at wireless. So I installed the latest version over my old version, and it told me I needed firmware, and duly grabbed and installed it. So I was online at last & I downloaded the LFS LiveCD (easy way to get all the packages & patches) and started working through the instructions.

Or at least, tried to. But Ubuntu doesn't come with the ability to compile software and I can never remember the name of the package you need. Hunted it down & got it, tried again. But I got weird linking error messages. So I got annoyed and decided to look into ALFS - automated installation of a base LFS system.

Downloaded it, tried to start it, got the error message that ncurses wasn't installed. Except it is.

Nnnng.

Ubuntu is clearly not a good place to try and install LFS from. Booting off the LiveCD would be a good idea. Only I have no discs to burn it to.

But this is Linux. Everything is a file. There's no difference, to Linux, between an iso file and a physical CD.

So I mounted the ISO image via the loopback, copied the kernel and initrd files to the hard drive, created a grub entry capable of booting off the ISO (root=iso:/dev/XXX:/path/to/lfslivecd.iso) as per the LFS instructions, and booted into the LFS LiveCD from the ISO image.

Try doing THAT with Windows.

The LFS LiveCD is actually a pretty nice environment. Check it out if you need a LiveCD with a nice but lightweight GUI (It's XFCE) with lots of development tools.

ALFS is now perfectly feasible, but errors out right at the start trying to install GCC. The 1GB partition I have is too small to make it through the install process. A completed LFS is small, but the build process requires all the source code and compilation files, it needs more that a gig.

So I mounted my Ubuntu partition, and put the build directory on it instead. The install ran overnight and I woke up this morning to a completed LFS on the big Ubuntu partition. This I copied over to the smaller one. This is perfectly doable, because everything's a file and it makes no difference where it is on the actual disk.

The system isn't bootable yet - I haven't figured out all the things I need in the kernel - but the number of problems you can solve by virtue of the fact that in Linux, everything is a file and filesystems can be mounted and shunted around and chrooted... it's pretty impressive.

And the way DEs and distros are trying to hide "everything's a file" behind icons to auto-mounted DVDs and the like.. Sorry, guys, but I think your approach sucks.