LiveCD or No LiveCD?

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

Gerard Beekmans wrote:
> Whatever the starting point, the fact is that in such cases I don't want 
> to have to install a Linux system just so I can install LFS on the same 
> machine. That way I waste partition space. Maybe the space can be 
> repurposed later on (as a /home partition when all is done for example 
> or a /var partition - pick something) but maybe it's not practical to do 
>   so after the fact for reasons I haven't thought of yet.
> 
> I'm sure some of you will argue the fact that with today's hard drive 
> sizes, it's becoming more and more a non-issue. If you have a 200 GB 
> drive, wasting 5 or 10 GB is not a problem. The real issue is just the 
> principle. To a lot  of people this is the more important issue at hand. 
> I'm sometimes a bit of a purist so I fall into that category as well.
> 
> It's still a very valid point that must be taken into account somehow.

Thanks to the fact that LFS is installed on the ext3 filesystem now, this is not 
an issue at all. Just, while installing a distro, allocate the partitions so 
that the future LFS partition comes first (or second, if you want a separate 
/boot) and gets formatted with ext3. Then build LFS, boot into it, remove the 
distro partition, and resize the LFS partition online with resize2fs. It works 
and the end result is just one big LFS partition.

As for your inability to use the LiveCD in the past on Intel motherboards, that 
was due to linux-2.6.16 (i.e., too old kernel). In order to use LFS, you would 
have to update the kernel. But that's a deviation from the book - i.e., the book 
was bad in the first place, because there was no stable release with a kernel 
suitable for your computers. Release stable LFS more often in order to avoid 
that in the future :)

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov