What a Long Strange Trip It's Been...

Hi, Folks,

I'm going to step out of character here for just a moment.  I've described myself  in "real life" on several occasions as a "recovering rocket scientist - well, more of a technologist, really."  When the Shuttle program wound down in 2009, I held onto my job, did what I had to do, and made a career transition that I believed was going to help me reach my eventual goal of a position in the IT department, but things have changed in ways I would not have expected (funny how that happens, is it not?), and I have been compelled to take the boolean by the horns, so to speak, and shape the situation to my advantage.

For this, and other reasons, I haven't had the time or inclination to re-engage my pursuit of Linux From Scratch.  Perhaps much further down the road that may happen, but I have no idea when.

For the time being, this blog will lie fallow until I think of something else to do with it.  To those who have read so far, thanks.  I hope you are not too disappointed with me.  If you are, just remember this:  I'm not done yet.  Unless a beer truck runs over me or something else unfortunate happens, I'll be back with another wacky idea or some damn-fool project to pursue.  Until then, I'll be seeing you...

Later On,
D

It's Been A While. Perhaps Explanations Are In Order?

It's simple, really:  I've taken a break from LFS while I have been testing the 2010 releases of PCLinuxOS.  I'll get back to LFS eventually, I'm sure, after I've learned a bit more about it. (And after I've deployed PCLOS KDE4 to my laptop.)

Right now, I'm trying to develop an 8-in-1 Live Boot DVD with all the various respins of PCLOS 2010 on one disk.  I'm learning more than I ever wanted about Plymouth bootloader.

Unnecessary Twaddle

I'm not usually one for unnecessary twaddle, but it's been a while since I last wrote about what's going on in the lab, so here it goes:

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Synopsis: Preparations of the new host system for LFS are taking longer than expected.

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Live & Learn - Back To The Beginning...

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Synopsis:  After all the work done on the toolchain, we discover a problem with Glibc.  This, and some revisions to LFS prompt us to begin at the beginning with more recent sources.  We hatch our plans for going forward.

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A Bit of A Puzzlement

The Doctor did, indeed, make it in late yesterday evening, just as I was beginning to move forward with actually trying to use the toolchain I have spent the last few days creating.

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Synopsis:  A bit of a puzzlement occurred during an attempt to execute a sed command to supposedly suppress the installation of header files into /usr/include/scsi in preparation for exposing the Linux kernel's API to Glibc, the system's C library.  (We're working in Section 6.7 of the documentation.)

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A Little Egg On My Face, Yes?

This will be just a quick note, so no synopsis is really needed.  After all that going on I did about tar and bunzip2 in the previous entry, what do I find out in reading about tar in my Linux Pocket Guide?

It seems there is a -j switch for tar (alternatively expressed as --bzip2) such that one may extract a .bz2 zipped tar archive by, for example:

tar -xjvf some-file-or-other-1.2.3.tar.bz2

which results in a single-pass extraction to a folder named  

some-file-or-other-1.2.3 

beneath the present one.

Dash it all!  I could have been saving steps all over the place!  It'll pay me to read more carefully.  (At least I figured it out for myself before the Doctor looked over my shoulder.) 

Chain, Chain, Chain - Chain of Tools

The Doctor is still out of town, and I must say:  I've had fun building the toolchain for this little creature of ours.  Now, of course, the real work begins, but, as of now, the building of usable tools is completed.

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Synopsis:

 We discuss some of the errors made while building the basic toolchain for LFS, along with the steps taken to correct the problems which arose.

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