The Linux Experiment

I’ve now been actively using my (Beyond) Linux from Scratch installation for about a week now, and it’s actually pretty neat to have something working that I built with just a general outline. Granted, the LFS guide is very well put together, but going beyond the basic console of a system requires a bit of time and effort.

In really any other distro, the package manager should really be your best friend (except when it breaks.) Even in a source-based Linux like Gentoo, Portage gives you a pretty decent idea of what’s installed and is able to keep track of dependencies. With LFS, there are really some times where I don’t want to have to locate and download seventeen .tar.bz2 files, and ./configure –prefix=/usr; make; make install to each one in sequence. What’s worse is when you run into three dependencies for a particular piece of software, and the first two install properly, but the third one depends on ten additional packages.

This is what building software in LFS looks like.

There are also some libraries that despite being built on an x86_64 system will come out as 32-bit, and require special compiler or configure flags in order to build a pure 64-bit version. LFS x86_64 does not really have patience for anything 32-bit. This is generally fine because you’re building most of the applications yourself, but you can’t “just run” any typical application unless it’s taken the architecture into account.

In summary, while it’s awesome to go to SourceForge and have the very latest version of a package, sometimes I just don’t feel like going through all those hoops and satisfying twenty conditions for a compile to take place. Perhaps I’m OK if your application uses a built-in library rather than relying on whatever happens to be installed in /usr/lib.

The takeaway from this is that besides providing the source, considerate developers should try and build an i686 and x86_64 binary from that same source. If your build system has issues or you find it painful to produce binary releases, remember that anyone attempting to follow the INSTALL file will run into the same pain points. Firefox, for example, has both i686 and x86_64 release tarchives. The 64-bit version works quite well on my LFS installation and it’s how I’m writing this post.

Hi Everyone,

Now that I have a relatively stable environment, I just wanted to write an update of how things went, and some issues that I ran into while installing my desktop environment.

No Sound

Not that I was expecting anything different from LFS, but I had no sound upon booting into KDE. I found this quite strange, as alsamixer was showing my sound card fine. One thing I can tell you, is that alsaconf is a filthy liar. My sound is now working, and it still says it can’t find my card. I’m not sure how I got it working, but here are a few tips.

• Make sure your sound is un-muted in alsamixer.
• Check your kernel to make sure that either support is compiled in for your card, or module support is selected.
• If you selected module supprt, make sure the modules are loaded. For me, this was snd-hda-intel.

Firefox and Adobe Flash

I’m not going to go into too many details about Firefox, as Jake covered this in his post here, but I’d like to note that installing Flash into Firefox was quite easy. All I had to do was download the .tar.gz from Adobe, and do the following:

tar -xvf flash.tar.gz (or whatever the .tar.gz is called)

cd flash

cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins (make sure plugins is created if it does not exist.)

KDE Crash On Logout

The first time I tried to logout of KDE, I noticed that it crashed. After doing some investigations, I found a solution here. You want to edit your $KDE4_PREFIX/share/config/kdm/kdmrc to reflect the following:

[X-:*-Core]
…
TerminateServer=true

What’s Next?

I’m actually not sure what I’m going to do next. I suppose I should get VLC running on the system, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. I now have a working web browser, flash, and sound, which should be fine until I can get other things working.

Using the instructions from the BLFS book with the latest available 3.6 build of Firefox, I was able to achieve success. I figured I’d try out 3.6 before going onto something with a terribly inflated version number, and as per usual, ran into some problems:

• Rebuild libpng-1.5.5 with APNG support. This is actually optional as I ended up commenting out the –with-system-png option in mozconfig.
• In the suggested mozconfig, comment out the last two lines:
  

  #ac_add_options --with-system-libxul
  #ac_add_options --with-libxul-sdk=/usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.2.13

  to create a standalone build.

• Apply the GCC patch from this Bugzilla report (direct download).
• Apply a partial patch from the Chromium project of all places. I’ve customized it here:
  

  
  # TLE Patch for Firefox/LFS

  diff -u a/gfx/ots/src/os2.cc b/gfs/ots/src/os2.cc
  — a/gfx/ots/src/os2.cc 2011-11-02 07:10:17.000000000 -0400
  +++ b/gfx/ots/src/os2.cc 2011-11-02 07:10:30.000000000 -0400
  @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@
  #include “os2.h”

  #include “head.h”
  +#include <cstddef>

  // OS/2 – OS/2 and Windows Metrics
  // http://www.microsoft.com/opentype/otspec/os2.htm

• Apply a GCC4.6-specific patch to fix various .cpp files. Some parts of the patch will fail; that’s expected.
• Manually edit layout/style/nsCSSRuleProcessor.cpp and go to line 1199. Change the source code as follows:
  
  const nsCaseInsensitiveStringComparator ciComparator;
  should become
  
  const nsCaseInsensitiveStringComparator ciComparator = nsCaseInsensitiveStringComparator();
  
• For the toolkit/components/places/src/SQLFunctions.cpp file, change line 126 to:
  const nsCaseInsensitiveStringComparator caseInsensitiveCompare = nsCaseInsensitiveStringComparator();
• In toolkit/crashreporter/google-breakpad/src/common/linux/language.cc, make sure line 51 is changed to:
  const CPPLanguage CPPLanguageSingleton = CPPLanguage();
• In toolkit/xre/nsAppRunner.cpp, line 990:
  
  static const nsXULAppInfo kAppInfo = nsXULAppInfo();
  
• While this is resolved in newer Firefox versions, copy security/coreconf/Linux2.6.mk to security/coreconf/Linux3.1.mk to add support for the 3.1 kernel.

Your reward will be a working Firefox installation:

Do your GTK applications (i.e. Firefox) look like something designed in the 90′s in KDE? I think I can help you.

I installed the latest Firefox, (not the one in the screenshot, I stole this.) and was very disappointed to see something like the following:

Tyler pointed me to the Gentoo guide here, which helped me find out which packages I needed.

If you install Chakra-Gtk-Config, and either oxygen-gtk or qtcurve (make sure to download the gtk2 theme), you will have better looking GTK applications in no time. Note that there are probably tons of other GTK themes for KDE4, these are just some suggestions to get you started.

That is much better.