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I've begun building an LFS system because I've heard it's a great way to learn Linux. I'm in the middle of chapter 5 right now (and you can see the TOC here), and all I've done so far is set up my host environment, download a bunch of packages, and I have begun compiling them. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be learning from issuing a bunch of configure/make commands.

Could anyone please give me some advice on how to get the most out of building an LFS system? What and where in particular should I be focusing my attention?

Thanks

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    Opinionated, but "learn linux" is a wide field after all. LFS has a focus on the building and dependencies part of it. If that's not your area of interest, a regular Linux install will do.
    – frostschutz
    Jun 14, 2020 at 19:06

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I suggest:

  • Complete building it and use it as desktop distribution for at least half a year building everything you need.
  • Update some packages that change noticeable in this time, e.g., the plasma desktop.
  • Customize everything. When building a program, run ./configure --help and decide which features you want to --enable- or --disable-

Be aware, that your system will be outdated quite soon and may accumulate security bugs when you are not following enough security lists and other news sources to learn when a program urgently needs to be updated, so you will probably want to replace it with another distribution eventually.

But by then you also will know how to (re-)build packages and only need to learn how to do this in a clean way for your next distribution. Debian has a nice guide how to build packages and I suppose redhat has one for RPM as well. Keep building a few programs that can be adapted to your needs or for which you want the latest git version and enjoy what you learned when you used LFS.

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