18 Booting & Testing – Linux From Scratch 4.0 to 5.0
The first boot of the new LFS-5.0 system and fixing any issues found after testing including a fix to allow access to into the old version of SSH installed from BLFS 5.0.
Celebrating Linux From Scratch’s first 25 years by continuing the odyssey through past versions from the original 1.0 to the latest.
My original plan was to jump to LFS-6.3 from 4.0 but I had so many problems, fixing one and then moving on to be stopped by another, I felt I was just patching holes in a sinking ship. A few ‘minor’ tools did not meet the host system requirements these are easy to fix. In any case they made no apparent difference to the problems I encountered.
I think the biggest problem was that the host system had to be booted with version 2.6 of the Linux kernel that was compiled with Gcc version 3.x. LFS-4.0 has Gcc-3.2 but I felt that the LFS-4.0 tool chain was just not quite new enough to prepare the initial 2.6 Kernel correctly and/or build a stable tool chain required by LFS-6.3 so I decided to target LFS-5.0 instead.
Once the host has been set up correctly, LFS 5.0 itself is a very robust build and I don’t remember ever having problems building this version successfully. This experience is repeated here, with no hacks or fixes required to complete the build.
It might be impossible to do this on modern hardware – the support for things such as SATA, NVMe, PCI-e, USB, etc. either just didn’t exist at the time or support was still nascent in the Linux kernel.
LFS-5.0 was published 5 November 2003.
I did not have a PC from the correct period so continued to use the same machine that I used for LFS 1.0 and 4.0. The build still completes in a reasonable time but obviously takes a lot longer than before. It’s an Intel Pentium 233 MMX with 64 MB memory and 80 GB hard disk. The disk and DVD drive are the only things that aren’t contemporary but that fact doesn’t affect the build in any way. Note that there seems to be power issues with the video signal on this machine which is revealed in various ways including the image shaking slightly especially during disk accesses.
All sane ancient LFS releases can be found at the LFS Museum: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/museum/lfs-museum
Playlist for this series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyc5xVO2uDsCe8DA9FiD19WWmjYHslug0
Playlist for *all* the LFS builds from LFS 1.0 onwards: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyc5xVO2uDsDj4XISl4fUx8lUNyFXIiBk
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