everything samwyse knows / reviews

Since before adopting children from there four years ago, I’ve been trying on and off to learn Russian. I’ve not made much progress, mostly because it seems that Russian isn’t the most popular foreign language for people to learn. I have, however, learned a fair bit about the process of learning a foreign language. So when the opportunity came up to go for Japan for business, I was in a position to start learning the language quickly. (more…)

Yesterday, I discussed my experiences with rPath, and the one thing that I dislike about it. (Fortunately, the developers are aware of the problem and seem to be working on it.) Today I’m going to discuss Linux From Scratch, aka LFS.
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In the beginning, to use Linux you had to download and compile a kernel, and then download and compile any programs that you wanted to use. This was a tedious and error-prone process, so after a while someone came up with the idea of the “distribution”, aka “distro”. This combined a pre-compiled kernel, a selection of other software, and a process for installing everything onto disk. Since the process of building a distro was still tedious and error-prone, many of the largest are supported by commercial ventures, such as Fedora Project (Red Hat), openSUSE (Novell), Ubuntu (Canonical, Ltd) and Mandriva Linux (Mandriva).

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