Building Linux from Scratch

Author: Bayo Oyekole
Posted in GNU/Linux, Tips, Tweaks and Tricks, Linux on July 7th, 2007 
Visited 287 Times

Sometimes you just want to have more power than the average GNU/Linux distribution puts in your hands. Ordering the entire Debian Etch DVD collection is taking longer than I thought, so I opted to build my Linux using my own chosen collection of software. After some thorough searching, I came upon the site Linux from Scratch, which gives instructions on building your own ddistribution. There is a sort of twist, in that you need an existing,functional installation of Linux to build linux! In my case, i had Ubuntu on my laptop a Toshiba Tecra TE2300 (I have not found a single review on this laptop on the internet, not even a simple spec list! That is a topic for another article…). Miraculously, all the hardware on my laptop is detected and working. The only problem i have is, downloading build-essential package with an inconsistent network/internet connection had been frustrating: sometimes the dependent packages would install, and an attempt to compile would tell me crt1.o could not be found.Fortunately the LFS (Linux From Scratch) team provides a functional LiveCD, which you can use to begin your foray in to the wild, wild, world of Linux software compilation.

Ubuntu Linux 5 tryout

Author: Bayo Oyekole
Posted in Software Reviews, GNU/Linux on February 20th, 2007 
Visited 324 Times

After I lost my Fedora Core 3 CDs due to poor storage, I started hunting for places to get a replacement. Somehow, nobody in my immediate vicinity even knew anything about linux. I had a few LiveCD ISO’s on hard disk (SuSE 9.2 Live, DSL, SLAX 5.0, Mandrake Live, Tomsrtbt, etc), but using them made me feel somehow crippled. I needed a fully fledged distro i could install, with GCC, Wine, KDE, XMMS, video codecs, full suite of network tools, and drivers for my Wireless LAN Card (i hate having to compile drivers if i can avoid it). Asking around was fruitless - people were like “Linux? huh? what’s that?” And my poor shared 64Kbps connection could not download the 5 FC3 ISO’s. What a shame. I was strolling the corridors of Nairaland When i noticed that someone mentioned that there was a company, www.canonical.com, that was shipping Linux CDs for free, to anywhere in the world. The distro name? Ubuntu Linux.