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From LFScript
Revision as of 11:45, 11 March 2017 by Marcel (talk | contribs)
MATE Desktop and Compiz Reloaded, built with LFScript 4 rev. 28.

Linux From Script (or 'LFScript') is an unofficial alternative for 'Automated Linux From Scratch'. LFScript includes thoroughly tested scripts generated from the LFS and BLFS books, with which you can build a complete Linux operating system from scratch. The scripts are layed out similarly to the LFS and BLFS books, which means that if you have read the LFS books, you should have no problem editing them to customize your system in any way you want.

One difference with regular LFS (besides the automation), is that LFScript builds simple package archives (XZ compressed TAR archives) for each individual software package. Besides easy transferrence of your system, this allows for cleaner selective upgrades and pausing builds in between packages. LFScript logs all compilation and installation messages to one file per package, allowing you to quickly debug your modifcations. LFScript also includes a script to build a Live CD from your system.

Contributing

This being a Wiki, if you want to, you can contribute to it easily. All I ask is that you create an account before you edit or create anything. If you decide to create some documentation, please link to it on the Documentation page before you do.

If you have created a script for a package which you would like to see added to LFScript, you could convert it to a Wiki page and add it to the Extra packages section. All packages defined on that page will automatically be imported in LFScript's next revision.

If you would like to support this project financially, please click the button below:

To see what your donation has been spent on, visit the Accounting page.

What is included?

Each LFScript revision consists of a build manager (the bash script named 'lfscript'), the means to generate scripts from the LFS/BLFS books (ScriptFactory) and a set of pre-generated scripts for the LFS/BLFS versions at the time of release. The build manager has not changed substantionally in the last few years, but the scripts to build LFS and BLFS have. Most work is therefore done on ScriptFactory to maintain the ability to quickly produce a current set of buildscripts.

Even though LFScript contains scripts for all of LFS and BLFS, not all scripts are known to work properly. If some software you want is not on the list of tested scripts, you should be prepared to edit and debug the scripts for them yourself. Each revision of LFScript can always build at least a basic LFS system, the X window system from BLFS and has the ability to produce a live CD.

Source code mirror service

To guarantee that all source code required to build an operating system is available to you, LFScript will automatically use a private mirror where a copy of all source code for the software packages used by the most notable versions of LFScript is maintained, if the primary download location goes down.

Getting started

If you are new to LFScript you should start by reading the Quick Start guide. You could also read some of the other Documentation.

If you run into trouble you should Ask a Question, and if you have found a bug you should report it.

Download

You can always get the most recent version with the following command:

wget lfscript.org/latest.tar.bz2

These are the most notable versions available:

Revision 27 (September 5th, 2014)

LFS version 7.6: SVN-20140821 (svn 10727)
BLFS version 7.5: 2014-08-22 (svn 13994)
LFS coverage Full. Kernel version 3.16.1
BLFS coverage Full. However, some scripts might not work straight out of the box. See the Whitelist for a list of scripts which are known to work properly.
Custom scripts beyond BLFS MATE Desktop Environment and fsOS without X11 (which includes BuildISO Dependencies)

Revision 21 (February 12th, 2012)

LFS version 7.1: SVN-20120211 (svn 9742)
BLFS version 6.3: 2012-02-12 (svn 9383)
LFS coverage Full. Kernel version 3.2.5
BLFS coverage Full. However only Xorg, it's dependencies and dependencies for fsOS (which includes Firefox) have been tested and are known to work properly
Custom scripts beyond BLFS fsOS (which includes BuildISO Dependencies, MATE Desktop Environment (Gnome 2 fork), Compiz Fusion)

Revision 12 (June 19th, 2011)

In this revision, it has been reported that the archive for pixman is producing MD5 checksum errors. If you experience this problem, you can get the proper archive for pixman here.

LFS version 6.8
BLFS version 6.3: SVN-20110417 (svn 8882)
LFS coverage Full. Kernel version 2.6.37.2
BLFS coverage Full. However, only Xorg, Gnome 2.x and KDE 3.5 have been tested and are known to work properly
Custom scripts beyond BLFS BuildISO Dependencies, VLC media player, NTFS progs, OpenJDK)

Get the Live CD

The "From Script" OS

The "From Script" Operating System (or fsOS for short) is developed together with LFScript and is an example of the LFS/BLFS system you can build with LFScript.

To use LFScript, your current operating system (the "host system") must meet certain requirements (as described in LFS). If you use this Live CD as your host system, you do not need to worry about these.

Additionally, using a Live CD as a host system (preferably on a virtual machine) protects the OS you use every day and allows you to experiment freely.

Download (version 4r16)

This ISO image contains both a 32-bit and a 64-bit system, and can be used to run LFScript for i486, i586, i686 and x86_64 targets (provided that the host machine CPU is capable).

Size: 296MB

MD5 checksum: 0c31ea5da1258982a1056bd0c237e79a