Skills

First and foremost, building Linux is going to take you being familiar with all of these:

• Using the bash shell
• Text editing plain text files
• Building programs from source with the configure, make, make install build tools

If you need to brush up on any of those, check out these links:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Building-HOWTO.html

http://www.linuxhq.com/guides/LUG/guide.html

http://hints.cross-lfs.org/index.php/Essential_Prereading

Safety

Most of the things we'll do are completely safe. Any time there is a risk to the host operating system, you'll see this icon:

When you see that, it means you're about to do something that might harm your host OS. You'll probably be ok, but just in case, I'd recommend backing up important files and having a recovery disk ready.

These will be rare, and I'll give you instructions to avoid problems. But whenever you see that icon, don't proceed until you're sure you understand the instructions.

Environment

In the "Scripts" task, there's a script called version-check.sh that will let you know if you are ready to build CLFS. If there are any problems, you will get output that looks like this:

version-check.sh: line 5: bison: command not found.

If the only output is a bunch of command names and version numbers, like this:

gcc.exe (GCC) 4.6.2

(the bzip2 line will lead off with some unprintble characters, that's okay), then the test was successful and you can build CLFS. I have some sample output at the end of the third video in the Build Environment Set-Up (Windows) task if you aren't sure.