I first used LFS to build my own distro back in college and that experience made me learn a lot about the components of the Linux system which is helpful to me even now. I used it again years later to build an extremely lightweight base for docker containers. Its very versatile and I hope this project helps people as much as LFS helped me.
From an organizational structure, I see that buildyourownlinux.com is brought to us by Linux Academy, while linuxfromscratch.org is not affiliated with any other organization (as far as I can tell).
From a technical standpoint, I'm curious what differs. From what I recall, there are several reboots required during LFS - but at first glance I don't see any mention in BYOL.
Some of the provided tarballs are riddled with old vulnerabilities (and served over insecure channels (!!!) with no integrity checks), and thus it is relegated to educational purposes only, and should not be used for building a secure, general purpose system.
Does it support SATA and UEFI boot disks yet?
You can build LFS on any system that meets the requirements[1].
> Does it support SATA and UEFI boot disks yet?
The Linux kernel supports SATA disks since forever. UEFI is also supported by most bootloaders. The distro you build by following LFS will define support for things like UEFI.
I think you're confusing LFS with maybe a livecd image they used to put out?
[1] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter02/ho...
At a minimum, disk layouts are drastically different in UEFI and BIOS.
LFS is so woefully out of date that it isn't even funny.
The book refers to a separate text document for more info on UEFI, including the requirement of an EFI partition on a GPT formatted disk. Dated 2017. (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/lfs-ue...)
The links they give are to upstream. Some are already HTTPS, some redirect from HTTP. I found one case where upstream provides both HTTP and HTTPS and they link to HTTP. They should fix that.
They also provide md5sums of the tarballs, which get checked automatically in their automated build. They should switch to sha256, but there at least exists an integrity check.
I agree it's much more an educational project than a production one. But that would be true regardless; any system you're putting together by hand like this shouldn't be one that's going into production anywhere.
Are you sure you're referencing the current stable version of the LFS book (8.0)? As noted elsewhere in this thread, there was a Live CD version of LFS which hasn't been maintained for several years, but the main book project, along with the ancillary BLFS (Beyond LFS) and ALFS (Automated LFS) are very much alive and well. LFS 8.0 gives you glibc 2.25, gcc 6.3.0, and a 4.9 kernel. If you want bleeding edge, the development version of the book is updated when upstream source packages are released.
> Does it support SATA and UEFI boot disks yet?
LFS has supported SATA ever since it was available in the kernel! There's also nothing preventing you from building a UEFI capable LFS install, provided you setup the BIOS and grub properly.
> should not be used for building a secure, general purpose system.
Why not? LFS is more than capable of providing secure, general purpose systems -- desktop and server.
From looking over the BLFS now, I haven't had a lot of use-cases for building more userland-ish things. I've tried to avoid compiling X or Display Managers and stick to package managers if I wanted to try a new Desktop Environment. I've found Arch docs (or man pages) really helpful in configuring these kinds of things when I do need it. I can see this being more useful if I wanted to be more of a sysadmin. I remember trying to customize PAM and setup Kerberos years ago and feeling like there wasn't much help putting this all together or troubleshooting (it may have been prior to BLFS).
When you said "weirdly useless to understand linux" do you mean the linux kernel in the literal sense? Or the low level system stuff of how things are put together?
LFS is great no complaints no offense intended I know it must take a lot of work to keep it updated.
Then again lower down on the buildyourownownlinux site wget links to a LFS url so it must be the same people or LFS re-branded?
This page does make multiple mentions of it, but in a very offhanded way.
I would encourage the people behind this url to make a case upfront about why someone should use this link as opposed to directly going to LFS, and what do they have that LFS doesn't.
[1] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org