RPM Bootstrapping of LFS 11.3

In the old days when non-avian dinosaurs walked the earth, Red Hat had a decent end-user distribution called Red Hat Linux. I got my start in Linux using MKLinux DR3 which basically was Red Hat 5.1 ported to the Mach Microkernel.

Well, by decent end-user distribution, we will not talk about Red Hat 7 and the GCC 2.98 debacle...

Sometime later, when yum came into being, third party package repositories become common with Fedora Extras being the most popular. Those were good days.

Sometime later, the desktop end-user distribution became Fedora and with it came a very rapid release cycle with a quick EOL (End Of Life) and the focus seemed to change, with Fedora basically becoming a testing ground for what was going to be included in the next RHEL. I became disenfranchised with Fedora, and constantly needing to install a new buggy version because the version I had been using when EOL as soon as the bugs in it seemed to largely be ironed out.

I switched to CentOS 5 which had an incredible lifespan, and stuck with CentOS 5 until CentOS 7 was released.

CentOS 7 targets enterprise use but in many respects I used it in a similar fashion as the old Red Hat plus additional repository system meaning I maintained my own package repositories for things like FFmpeg, GStreamer, VLC, PHP, etc. where the CentOS/EPEL versions of those packages either did not exist or were too old.

CentOS 7 was my base, and when I needed something more modern than what it shipped with, I built it (using GCC 5.x in /opt when GCC 4.x was too old, e.g. for building Audacity).

CentOS 7 will go EOL on June 30, 2024 (just over a year from now), CentOS 8 is already EOL (as of December 31, 2021), and when CentOS 7 goes EOL people will be forced into CentOS Stream which I really have no interest in. It looks like it is a QA distro for RHEL, so that the users are basically unpaid testers for RHEL.

Frack that. I do not want to be a free tester for their commercial product they profit from.

Linux From Scratch

I had done the Linux From Scratch (LFS) project a couple times in the past as part of learning Linux, so I decided that I wanted to just do Linux From Scratch as my desktop distribution without an upstream vendor telling me I have to move to a new product. I can upgrade it when I feel like it.

LFS lacks a package manager. There are several options available, but I am already fond of the RPM Package Manager (RPM).

This git repository contains the RPM spec files for my RPM bootstrapping of LFS 11.3 with just enough additional packages for a basic TLS capable networking (based on GnuTLS as the TLS stack) and RPM itself with the dependencies needed to build RPM.

This may remain a personal project forever but I do hope to eventally (as in before June 30, 2024) have both a decent desktop environment and an installer, potentially allowing this to become a community driven “Socialist GNU/Linux” (users own the means to production) that is not driven or steered by capitalist interests as that is what I blame the demise of Red Hat on.

Note that Fedora is actually a very good distribution for numerous use cases, it is just I felt really left out of those cases. I think it is possible to still meet many of those use cases without taking the direction Fedora took when Fedora Extras went away and the Red Hat distribution for desktop end users became Fedora.

Please note I would not be able to spend the time I am spending on this without a benefactor who like me is saddened that the EOL of CentOS 7 seems to be the EOL of an era.

Also please note I would not be able to create this project without the Free Software Movement having resulted in a large collection of high-quality FLOSS (Free-Libre Open Source Software).

Servers will run on this when I am done, but servers really should have SELinux and I have no interest in SELinux for Desktop users, which is my target.

Use a commercial distribution for your server needs, preferably one with a support contract and experienced coders who can deal with both security and usability bugs in a timely manner.

EOF