Adrian Fisher wrote on Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 06:47:56PM +0000: > I am sure many of you will be familiar with the web-site Linux from > scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) which is fine for those > who wish to use Linux but has anyone here tried it with Open?
OpenBSD ist designed as a consistent and complete operating system and it is extensible via ports. So the concept "roll your personal collection of stuff your own way" looks rather pointless to me in the context of OpenBSD. It is certainly incompatible with both the official project goals and with common advice from experienced developers how to solve real-world tasks using OpenBSD. Besides, the official goals listed on www.linuxfromscratch.org pretty much look like non-issues in the context of OpenBSD: - "LFS teaches people how a Linux system works internally." You are welcome, go read /usr/src, that's fun indeed. But there is really no need to turn everything upside down while (let alone before) you are about it... ;-) - "Building LFS produces a very compact Linux system." The default install of OpenBSD produces a very compact operating system, too. Besides, chapter 2.2 of the LFS book states: "A minimal system requires a partition of around 1.3 GB." Isn't that strange? I doubt LFS is meeting it's own goals. The minimum recommended space for an OpenBSD 4.2 system is 945 MB - nota bene, for a "typical home system connected to the internet" including X11, not for a bare-bone minimal installation. The OpenBSD firewall router this message will pass out from currently uses 650 MB of disk space, and i didn't do anything to economize disk space - no need to bend over, its 3 GB disk is mostly empty, anyway. If need be, gimme a 486 processor, 32 MB of RAM and a 200 MB hard disk and i will build a fully functional OpenBSD firewall router for your 100 Mb/s internet uplink. Agreed, nowadays, that's close to an exercise in futility and certainly doesn't make the system more maintainable, more useful or more secure. - "LFS is extremely flexible." If you have special needs, feel free to hack into whatever you like in /usr/src. Break it, and you keep the pieces. Probably, rebuilding everything from scratch will be less productive than hacking up one thing at a time. Start on easy stuff and hope that art@ and miod@ are doing the process scheduling nicely without you putting your foot into it. Besides, correctness, security, conciseness and usability rank higher among OpenBSD's goals than flexibility. OpenBSD tends to avoid useless knobs. Still, when it comes to flexibility that is actually useful, i feel extremely comfortable with OpenBSD's flexibility. - LFS offers you added security. That's pointless for OpenBSD which offers you security by default. Of course, if you have special requirements, you can further harden the OpenBSD default install. But usually, that's just a waste of time, and unless you are very knowledgeable and experienced, chances are you will rather spoil than improve your system. Thus, i think OpenBSD fulfills (and surpasses) linuxfromscratch.org's goals out of the box, so i fail to see any need (or even, any room) for some "OpenBSD from scratch" project.
