[nzlug] Kernel squared

[Andrew Errington]

On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 11:30, you wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 09:59:08 +1200, Jim Cheetham <jim at gonzul.net> wrote:
> > It's a good learning experience; although I've heard people say that
> > the "Linux from Scratch" model is better to learn from than Gentoo.
>
> I was going to come to that next: Has anybody ever attempted a Linux from
> Scratch install?
>
> It looks perversely tempting but also hugely daunting, but I presume the
> educational gain must be immense. No more stupid questions on NZLUG after
> that.

I used Linux from Scratch to build up the OS for my lounge MP3 player.  The 
lounge MP3 player is a small PC motherboard in a nice wooden case.  It has 
an SMC ethernet card, a SoundBlaster card and a 4 line x 40 character LCD 
connected to the parallel port.  It also has an IR receiver connected to 
the the serial port, but no software for it yet.  The PC boots from the 
network, mounts an NFS file share (of MP3 files, not uncoincidentally), 
builds a random playlist, then plays them.  The Linux from Scratch 
documentation was excellent, and I was able to build a small kernel and 
root filesystem to boot over the network.  I can't remember why I didn't 
just cut down an existing distro, possibly some ill-conceived notion about 
the pursuit of knowledge, but probably because it allowed me to include 
only what I needed, thus keeping it all small (the kernel and rootfs file 
is only 4Mb).

Andrew