Martin Miehe wrote:
> If you already tried to do LFS with an analogous modem then you will  
> probably know the advantages of a LiveCD on which all the stuff is  
> gathered so that you can download it in some minutes at anybody else,  
> who has fast internet.
>   

Indeed. But one can do the same with a tarball of all LFS packages:

http://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/sources/LFS/lfs-packages/lfs-packages-6.3.tar

and get the benefit of both having all packages at hand and using a 
well-maintained distro (when I say "well-maintained", I mean that, at 
least, package versions are updated only after looking at the changelog 
and figuring out whether new configure options are needed - this is not 
the case for the LiveCD).

> I know there are binary distros I could use as host. But why should I  
> first download any binary distro and then all the LFS packages if I  
> could download the LFS LiveCD and get all at once?

I see. This does answer my "is the LiveCD needed" question.

> Maybe if I had  
> already installed Debian this would make sense, but I have not. And  
> there is still the question of speed. You tried Debian in a  
> low-spec-VM. I do not know nothing about VMs, because I never needed  
> it. Did you slow down CPU, BUS and the HDD, too?

There are no such knobs, but the "qemu" emulator is indeed very slow 
(approximately 20x CPU slowdown, and the hard disk speed is around 6 MB/s).

>  Did you switch off MMX?

No, there is no such knob in qemu.

>  Did you run OpenOffice on it? Did it work well?

No, I haven't tried. But I think it won't run well on LFS, too.

> Concerning the package manager I read about some people who use LFS as  
> their main system and can live without it.

Only because they use a fast system where they can experiment with 
compilation and don't mind several suboptimal attempts.

> Others wrote their own  
> scripts to handle the packages or took the package managers of other  
> distros.

Correct - but they have to reinvent the wheel because this knowledge is 
not shared, and especially because of dangerously wrong hints such as 
"apt.txt". The Slackware package manager is, indeed, easy to set up.

> Especially portage seems to be quite popular. But this is off  
> topic, I think.
>   

No, this is very well within the topic. Currently Jeremy Huntwork is 
busy redesigning the LiveCD build process in such a way so that the 
minimal CD does not have to be built separately. The idea (slightly 
simplified) is to create binary packages while building the full CD and 
then create less-than-full CDs using these packages instead of 
recompilation.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov
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