BLFS 6.2.0 Release Notes

Version 6.2.0 of BLFS has been released. Version 6.2.0 is the complement to the LFS 6.2 book. More time has elapsed between the release of the previous version (6.1) and this one than in any other release cycle. Much of this is due to the fact that LFS 6.2 took much longer to be released than was originally anticipated. Many new packages have been introduced in the 6.2.0 version, as well as many updates, refinements and additions to the existing packages.

The BLFS book now provides build and configuration instructions for almost 400 packages (600 if you count every individual package in the new Xorg instructions). Some of the new packages introduced in this version are: autotooled XOrg, HAL, D-BUS, GStreamer (now broken out into separate plugin packages), usbutils, libquicktime, GraphViz, K3b, dvd+rw-tools, NSS, Libidn, GAIM, Poppler, SeaMonkey, XChat, Audacious, cairo and unixODBC. Major updates include GNOME-2.14.3 (with several new GNOME packages such as Totem, gnome-mount and gnome-volume-manager), KDE-3.5.6, Firefox-1.5.x, Thunderbird-1.5.x, and most of the mainline server packages. As always, the list of packages that have been upgraded or added as well as configuration and build command changes are annotated in the Change Log.

Unfortunately, BLFS activity was semi-stagnant for several months after (and shortly before) the LFS 6.2 release. Therefore, many of the packages are somewhat dated (compared to previous BLFS versions). This brings us to why the versioning scheme has changed. This release is 6.2.0 as we fully anticipate releasing another version (6.2.1) just as soon as possible. The 6.2.1 release will also be based on the LFS-6.2 book, but will include updated packages, and fixes for any errors which may be discovered in 6.2.0.

As always, the main thrust of BLFS development will be to support the changes in the current LFS development book, but any changes or updates to the BLFS development book (that are compatible with LFS 6.2) will also be merged into the BLFS 6.2 branch. This way, a 6.2.1 version of BLFS should be released fairly soon, and should provide a very current and stable Linux platform.

Enjoy!

BLFS-6.2.0 Download Notes

For an HTML version you can read on-line, go to an HTML version on your local mirror. For a PDF version, go to a PDF version on your local mirror.

You can download the HTML or PDF version in compressed formats by choosing any of the following links below:

HTML bzipped tarball - 576Kb - MD5sum
HTML gzipped tarball - 906Kb - MD5sum
bzipped single HTML file - 530Kb - MD5sum
gzipped single HTML file - 844Kb - MD5sum
PDF bzipped tarball - 1.9Mb - MD5sum
PDF gzipped tarball - 2.0Mb MD5sum

If you have Subversion installed, you can check out the actual XML sources by issuing the following command:

svn checkout svn://svn.linuxfromscratch.org/BLFS/tags/6.2.0