Getting ready to launch

After a test run of jhalfs with some of the information in README.CUSTOM, there is reason to believe that I can attach as many programs as I want at the end of the LFS build. The hypothesis is that I can start with a blank disk and instruct the computer to build me a linux from scratch system, complete with a desktop environment, and have it ready for me when I come back a bit later. All I have to do is to put some specially formulated command files in the jhalfs/custom/config directory.

So there are just those final preparations to do. The format of those files is according to the jhalfs/custom/template. I'll fill in those files using the BLFS book and/or the scripts that the blfs_tool helped to create. The files will named by the package name prefixed with a number starting at 1000. The numbering has to correspond to the build order. I'll base my first guess of the order on a system previously built by hand.

My first estimate is that I'll be creating these files in the jhalfs/custom/config directory:
1000-gpm
1001-lynx
1002-bc
1003-dhcpcd
1004-expat
1005-freetype
1006-fontconfig
1007-libpng
1008-xorg
1009-nss
1010-zip
1011-pkg-config
1012-glib
1013-libIDL
1014-atk
1015-cairo
1016-pango
1017-jpeg
1018-tiff
1019-gtk+
1020-subversion
1021-libxml2
1022-tidy
1023-libxslt
1024-XML-Parser
1025-URI
1026-gdbm
1027-openssl
1028-Python
1029-dbus
1030-pciutils
1031-wget
1032-which
1033-hal
1034-vte
1035-alsa-lib
1036-shared-mime-info
1037-hicolor-icon-theme
1038-docbook-xsl
1039-sudo
1040-xfce
Give or take a few.

I am planning to copy the tarballs for these to the /sources directory on the target partition so that it wouldn't have to download them again.

The biggest puzzlers will be xorg and xfce.

Almost done (... thinking optimistically ...)

Here is a peek at how 1004-expat is starting to look:
#
# $Id$
#
# Any comments you wish to add
#

PKG="expat"
PKG_VERSION="2.0.0"
PKG_FILE="expat-2.0.0.tar.gz"
URL="ftp://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/BLFS/conglomeration/$PKG/$PKG_FILE"
MD5="d945df7f1c0868c5c73cf66ba9596f3f"
for i in PATCH{1..10}; do
unset $i
done
PATCH1=""

( cat << "xEOFx"
./configure --prefix=/usr &&
make
make install &&
install -v -m755 -d /usr/share/doc/expat-2.0.0 &&
install -v -m644 doc/*.{html,png,css} /usr/share/doc/expat-2.0.0
ldconfig
xEOFx
) > tmp


I plan to finish this up and launch it before I try out the Linux From Script (or LFScript) project which looks to be really good.