[jamiedamien]

I followed this during winter break my first year of college and loved it! Helped me learned Linux and co. pretty quickly and I used the machine as my main computer for the next 3.5 years of college.

Once you get X and google chrome it becomes pretty self sustainable. Updating the kernel is easy but upgrading the compiler / C library is a nightmare.

A lot of programs you might want to use provide binaries that makes things a bit easier, but there were some annoying days of dependency chasing if you have to install from source. I ended up writing some custom scripts to ./configure, make, and make install into a deb from .tar.gz.

About the initial LFS process, I had messed up a few steps pretty bad, and had to restart / go back one or two times. The worst mistake was embarking on the journey first by installing everything into a USB flash drive. Eventually data corruption / loss ruined the yacc binary (or similar? hard to remember) and I spent days trying to figure out what went wrong. After moving to an SSD it worked better :)

Definitely one of my favorite and most rewarding projects I've done.