My new project

Having sacrificed Debian and acquired a free partition, I am now trying to build a Linux system from the bottom up. It's not Linux From Scratch because I am using binary packages from the Slackware repository. So far I have installed glibc, elflibs (Patrick Volkerding's collection of essential Linux libraries), coreutils and bash. And I can chroot to it :-)! The next stage is to install tar, xz and the Slackware package utils. This will go a little faster now that I can run the post-installation scripts in the chroot environment instead of stepping through the code by hand to avoid doing something that would screw up Crux. Once I have the package utils, I can easily install the files I think I need for booting. I shall build and install my own custom kernel. When I have got it to boot, the next stage will be Internet access, then X and a desktop. The beauty of the whole thing is that I can do it in dribs and drabs through the winter whenever I have nothing more urgent to do. And I shall end up with a sleek, minimalist system that has nothing in it that I didn't put there deliberately, and a greatly increased knowledge of how Linux is put together.

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