[TriLUG] Linux from scratch project?

[Gregory Woodbury via TriLUG]

I grew up with UNIX (starting with Edition 6) when the command line
ruled. My first Linux distro was Slackware on floppy disks. Then moved
to RedHat linux at work and stayed with it through Fedora 18. At home
I have been using Gentoo on the main machine and have done LFS (about
2 years ago) to figure out some of the deeper dependencies between
various packages.

I like Gentoo as it is midway between a fully GUI desktop (I use KDE)
and the old command line I know so well. Gentoo is advanced enough
that a few cron jobs and update building scripts will take most of the
hassle out of updates.  Generally it is not necessary to re-compile
the whole system when things low in the stack are updated -- I only
recompile the kernel dependent packages for each new version of the
kernel (and have some scripts that build that command line.)

I have an old 400MHz Pentium II and run a binary based distro (Mageia)
on that since I don't feel like setting up a cross-compiler
environment.

I will note that historically Gentoo grew out of an LFS project that
added Portage (package manager) and a base system image that gets
things started. So I would say that Gentoo will give you a good
experience in system administration, and LFS will teach you some of
the real basic dependencies between packages.

-- 
G.Wolfe Woodbury
redwolfe at gmail.com