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.

---

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.)

---

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.

---

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.

---

A Bit of A Rant

So I get to the lab this morning and there's a note:

Igor,

I'll be out of town all week for that symposium I mentioned.  Please carry on with the experiments in my absence.  We'll chat when I get back.

Thank You,
F

Oh, well.  I suppose that means I'll do all the work, and he'll get all the credit, but what's a lab assistant for, anyway?  The Doctor treats me well enough, so I really can't complain.

What I can go off on a rant about is this:  There seems to be some sort of a disorder which afflicts more advanced Linux/Unix types which causes them to  use the most cryptic and obtuse of shorthands to "explain" complex and not-so-straightforward procedures.  I'll call this disorder cryptiphilia.  But first, the synopsis:

---

Synopsis:

A rant about cryptiphilia is interlaced among extensive reports of preparations for and progress in building the LFS toolchain (an important set of building blocks for all the rest of the LFS system.)

---

Preparations: Partitioning and Mounting the Filesystems

Igor here again; we're back from our meal. Where were we?  Oh, yes - the first signs of life and all that.  Since the entries from here on will be rather dry and technical, I'll give a short version at the beginning of each entry for those in a hurry, with details to follow on.

---

Synopsis:

We now have the following partitions/mounts added to our system:

/dev/hdd1, 4 Gigabytes, mounted on /mnt/lfs (the destination for our work)

/dev/hdd2, 1 Gigabyte, mounted as swap

/dev/hdd3, 14 Gigabytes, mounted on /home/lfs (for user lfs's files).

(If you're interested in why and how this was done, keep reading.)

---

Entry The First

Igor here. I will be logging these entries from the good Doctor's scribbled and cryptic notes as he does not have the time for such trivial and mundane pursuits. Always busy, that one is. At least it's not boring work.

The purpose of this log is to chronicle the adventures (and misadventures) the good Doctor and I have in configuring a reanimated computer. I anticipate it will one day come to an end, either with glorious success or crashing utter failure of our experiments. That said, perhaps our record here will keep some other research team from meeting some of the setbacks we have.