[TriLUG] Linux from scratch project?

[John Vaughters via TriLUG]

>How's TinyCore's package manager. Can you install all the usual
suspects?

TinyCore does have a package management tool, but I would not assume it is necessarily that latest builds or secure. You would probably want to verify yourself what the revisions of all the packages you will be using. The way you do make TinyCore Secure is you load the absolute minimum that you will need to solve your particular problem. I certianly would not go Enterprise with it, but you could use it for Kiosk, Compact Web Browser or embedded OS. They are working on a R-Pi version, I am not sure how mature it is. But I have found use for it by creating the absolute minimum system, for instance, that will allow me to turn a $25 used thin client into a data gathering system. My favorite thing about TinyCore is how easy it is to create a low resource system for small tasks with computers that most will give away. Building a custom netboot for diagnostics and maintenance or a USB boot stick for a computer in your pocket as other examples. It's been around a long while now, and has a decent support group. Also, it is meant to run entirely in memory and that makes it suprisingly fast and responsive. 

TinyCore is not a full blown distribution, although I think some people do try to make it that. The list of available packages kind of depends on the user group for someone that takes the time to create the package. So pure number of packages are limited, but for my uses, I have not really run into an issue. Certianly much of what most people expect is there. What version the packages are???? Beware.

I guess the point I was trying to make is as others have pointed out. LFS is nothing more than an excercise in understanding and while I do enjoy that learning, with TinyCore, you do the work to understand it AND it actually has a use afterwards. That was my main point. You will not get the same lesson from TinyCore as you will with LFS, which is why I enjoyed the LFS reading. However, you will still get quite a bit of Linux OS understanding from studying TinyCore.
John Vaughters