I recently undertook the installing (should I say compiling) of the most recent SVN of CLFS . As for some of you that are not familiar with the LFS model, have a look here. I wont go into instructions on how to install and configure CLFS, or any derivative.

After I had installed CLFS, and as with any other Linux from Scratch build, your perplexed on how to maintain, add or update the software. I have been using Arch for a short time, and realized that Arch’s pacman and ABS had the potential in being a powerful component for any CLFS build. I liked the idea of using Arch’s ABS PKGBUILD’s , because it wasn’t archetype specific. I could use this for i686, x86_64, multilib setups. This was diverse, and a great tool (You can thank the developers of Arch linux).  I documented my steps on installing pacman into CLFS, and I thought I’d post the steps I used. There are many ways you can do this, and I’m sure you can change the steps, and or make changes to my process. That’s the beauty of Linux, free to do what you want, and how.

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This is my first post on a blog that I have been procrastinating for some time. Overall, this blog will contain all kinds of hints and scripts that I have accumulated over time using Linux.

I first encountered Linux about 10 years ago. I was a hardware enthusiast & hobbyist, with a taste for overclocking and modding. I really was interested in how computers worked, and how to squeeze every ounce of performance I could from my setup. So… after using Windows, and working for a software firm, I decided to give Linux a try. Believe it or not, I started with trying SCO … then called Caldera, that was a mess… And that definitely came back to haunt SCO.

I’ve tried many distro’s off an on, and didn’t really find a complete interest with Linux. Until recently.. as within the last year, I have had many up’s and down’s… (Apt burning to the ground … lost my job … etc… etc …) Its been quite tumultuous and discouraging. I actually was able to salvage some hardware… Believe it or not… and I had a LFS partition on it that I was working on. This pretty much gave me the idea to continue an alternative to Windows.

I was working for Dell prior to all of this, and was working for there Tiered support team… And there was a Linux support team. Though I never officially supported Linux, I had an interest in something other then Windows, and wasn’t really much of a gamer. Then I entered the realm of Gentoo, I can honestly say, that I have learned more from using Gentoo & Funtoo then any other distro I’ve installed… I mean talk about moving from one distro to the next. I always seem to find something that was inhibiting or annoying. I have been a Gentoo user since my intro into Linux, and now officially am a Arch Linux user. I still maintain a Funtoo partition, but just got tired of the recent issue’s I was having with portage and python.

So… by a Linux standard user scale of newbie’ness, I am still fairly new with Linux. Though I have the basics down, and would like to share some scripts, hints, and tips, that I have collected over this past year, and share with anyone interested.