lesslinux.org Development Blog

So now you are ready building the chroot environment – then it is time to assemble the final ISO. To do this you need an overlay containing some configuration files for the bootloader. I packaged such an overlay for the current LessLinux Search and Rescue: lesslinux-search-and-rescue-uluru-20110202-155012-overlays-en.tar.bz2. You’ll find more recent overlays here: http://download.lesslinux.org/overlays/, but when building care that overlay and buildscripts match. Unpack the overlay in the folder /mnt/archiv/LessLinux. (more…)

Besides the switch to SQLite there are other big changes regarding the build of stage02, which is the population of the chroot environment:

• LessLinux now supports tracking of dependencies after building packages. This allows to define the order of packages to build.

• As a consequence of the dependency tracking it is now also possible to parallelize the build. On a three core Athlon this brought down build times from around three days to less than 20 hours. With a faster machine you should even get better results.

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Many changes were added since my first description of how to build LessLinux. There are two major changes that are worth noting most:

• We switched from MySQL to SQLite3 as database during build

• LessLinux is self containing now, this means you can use LessLinux to build LessLinux to build LessLinux…

The stage01 build of LessLinux very closely resembles the chapter Chapter 5 – Constructing a Temporary System from Linux from Scratch. You’ll even notice similar environment variables. There will always be slight differences in package versions – this is intended. So you might be able to build LessLinux on any machine equipped with the right programs to build Linux from Scratch. But in my opinion do one of the two following things: (more…)