[TriLUG] Linux from scratch project?

[Igor Partola via TriLUG]

I used to suffer from Gentoo-ism. I would not recommend it to anyone that's
remotely a perfectionist precisely because it exposes details to the user
that you otherwise don't know are there. Here is what used to be my
installation process to get optimal performance out of Gentoo:

1. Boot up the base system from a CD.
2. Compile the base system using the compiler on the CD.
3. Re-compile the base system using the newly compiled base system
compiler, since it is a newer version of GCC and thus might have
optimizations that the CD version of GCC did not have.
4. Re-compile the base system using the newest compiler, in order to take
advantage of optimizations in the new version of GCC that were compiled in
with itself.

This would take me roughly 2-3 days because of the stop and go nature of
it. Whenever a new version of the GCC package came out, I would redo steps
2-4 to upgrade everything.

It got so bad that I ended up setting up a cross-compiling stack on a
second computer along with ccache so that compilation results for things
that did not change would go faster. That's right, I had a computing farm
just to get Gentoo running on my laptop.

Did I mention that I wanted my Gentoo box to be as fast as possible, so I
would manually tweak all the compiler flags? Also, I ran openbox as my
window manager to save system resources. XKDE, Gnome, and KDE were just too
bloated for me at the time.

On the plus side I learned a lot about how the system boots, how to rescue
a broken Linux install, how a distro is put together, etc. At some point,
someone on the Internet convinced me that I should give Ubuntu a try and I
did not look back.

Igor