Anybody ever tried Linux From Scratch?

...I contend that one day I will ultimately prevail, but I'm not sure when that will be.

It takes a lot of time ... a LOT of time. I basically got to chapter 5 in their guide before I got distracted by something else and stopped playing with it.

...for something like that. Slackware would be a decent choice too. It gets you accustomed to the idea of not using package management as such and doing a lot of compiling from source. Both *do* have package management of a variety, and you can, of course, set your system up so that it would work with a standard rpm or deb repository, but that takes work too.

Gentoo documentation, btw, is excellent. I've used it to figure out things for several other distros.

The thing about LSF is you have to deal with things like compiling a compiler so you can compile things. But, I'll say this. Even though I didn't finish it yet, I learned more about Linux just playing with for a few weeks than I have running various Linux distros for five years. Slackware taught me a lot too.

If you have a spare drive laying around and an available IDE port, you could just plug that in and mess with it from time to time. I say "IDE" 'cause the initial bits of LSF have a lot of trouble dealing with SATA drives until you get well into it, at least in my experience. Since the first thin you do is prepare the drive for the install, that can be a deal breaker.

as well as a couple of spare machines with IDE drives, that I don't mind rewriting

someday..

Seems to me that Slackware is one of the few better-known Linux distros that at least require you to have to learn how to compile and create/locate files, along with needing to learn about dependencies. I remember how loooong it took to finally get my Linux-friendly all-in-one printer/scanner to work with SANE and CUPS. But I liked the trial and error of using early versions of Slackware, even though I crashed and caused kernel panic with many versions of it to the point of needing to reinstall them from scratch. Making mistakes is the best way to learn, of course, but it can get irritating and frustrating, especially when I was on the brink of successfully performing some task or installation/compilation. Bluetooth was also somewhat difficult to configure on Linux, when it was first introduced.

Xandros is one of the few Linux distros that remind me of Windows in that it has a proprietary bent and with my early adopter paid version, it was very limited and did not play well with any of my hardware, (scanners printers, cameras, ect..)

Mandrake became Mandriva, Red Hat became Fedora, and SUSE became Open SUSE. Of the three, I really disliked Mandrake. I still have the last versions of each one before they changed their names.

My first foray into a custom kernel was on Slackware. They don't put any barriers in the way of you doing it, and there's detailed documentation in various forms out there to help you navigate the brazillion options available in xconfig/menuconfig.

By contrast, I've found it more obnoxious to do it on distros like Ubuntu and SuSE. In theory it shouldn't be, but both do their own personalized things that seem to me to be intentional roadblocks to custom kernel building. But I'm just guessing at that.

Just make sure you have a working kernel in a backup directory somewhere, have familiarized yourself on how to use the backup, and have a boot disc available for when the inevitable kernel panic comes. My first try was a spectacular failure that consumed an entire weekend, but as you say, it was a learning experience. My second one actually booted, so it was all worth it.

And I don't particularly regret it. Faint praise, yeah?

I respect the project a great deal, and I probably learned a lot about how Linux works by using it. And I think that LFS provides a valuable service by simply emphasizing the fact that Linux is free, as in beer and as in speech, and that you don't necessarily have to rely on a company, whether Canonical or Red Hat or whoever to use a free, open-source operating system.

But after proudly using LFS for several years, I discovered Ubuntu, and all is history. When I was using LFS, I missed out on using some very valuable software, simply because of "dependency hell." When you are using LFS, you are basically maintaining your own Linux distribution. While that might be okay if I was making a living by providing a distribution, it sucks when you just want to use your personal computer to do stuff.

If you want to play around with LFS, I suggest you make a fairly small partition on your hard drive, a few gigabytes, and give it a go. You can set it up easily so that you can access your data on other partitions, from your LFS one.

Experimenting with Linux From Scratch can be a lot of fun. And educational. But from a day-to-day usage perspective, I'd say that Ubuntu or Debian is more like the way to go. Good luck!

I've jammed about two dozen different distros into virtualbox, which gives me some basis for look-n-feel and relative speed, but I am looking to build a educational playground on an old junkbox

I suggest you check out the Rute User's Tutorial And Exposition.

While it may be a little outdated in regards to hardware specs and such (the copyright is listed as 2002), it's the single most informative free source of information on unleashing the power of Linux that I know about. It's a source made for geeks. :)

If you're really just trying to educate yourself about linux on a "junkbox," I would suggest doing away with virtualbox, and just setting up a multi-boot machine. Find an old 40-gig hard drive and load it up with ten or twenty distributions. ;) And put a separate, bigger drive in for data if you want to. Terabyte drives are under ninety bucks these days, I think. (Storage has gotten cheaper, but it seems that the newer drives wear out faster than they use to.)

Good luck in your quest. And by the way, I don't know but a tiny fraction of the stuff in "Rute." My basic operating philosophy is to remain as blissfully ignorant as possible, until a need arises, and then go look it up on Rute. :)