This chapter includes a list of packages that need to be downloaded in order to build a basic Linux system. The listed version numbers correspond to versions of the software that are known to work, and this book is based on their use. We highly recommend against using newer versions because the build commands for one version may not work with a newer version. The newest package versions may also have problems that require work-arounds. These work-arounds will be developed and stabilized in the development version of the book.
Download locations may not always be accessible. If a download location has changed since this book was published, Google (http://www.google.com/) provides a useful search engine for most packages. If this search is unsuccessful, try one of the alternative means of downloading discussed at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/packages.html#packages.
Downloaded packages and patches will need to be stored somewhere that
is conveniently available throughout the entire build. A working
directory is also required to unpack the sources and build them.
$LFS/sources can be used both as the
place to store the tarballs and patches and as a working directory.
By using this directory, the required elements will be located on the
LFS partition and will be available during all stages of the building
process.
To create this directory, execute the following command, as user
root, before starting the download
session:
mkdir -v $LFS/sources
Make this directory writable and sticky. “Sticky” means that even if multiple users have write permission on a directory, only the owner of a file can delete the file within a sticky directory. The following command will enable the write and sticky modes:
chmod -v a+wt $LFS/sources
There are several ways to optain all the necessary packages and patches to build LFS:
The files can be downloaded individually as described in the next two sections.
For stable versions of the book, a tarball of all the needed files can be downloaded from one of the LFS files mirrors listed at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/mirrors.html#files.
The files can be downloaded using wget and a wget-list as described below.
To download all of the packages and patches by using wget-list as an input to the wget command, use:
wget --input-file=wget-list --continue --directory-prefix=$LFS/sources
Additionally, starting with LFS-7.0, there is a separate file,
md5sums, which can be used to
verify that all the correct packages are available before proceeding.
Place that file in $LFS/sources and
run:
pushd $LFS/sources md5sum -c md5sums popd
This check can be used after retrieving the needed files with any of the methods listed above.