Copyright © 2001-2020 The BLFS Development Team
Copyright © 2001-2020, The BLFS Development Team
All rights reserved.
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Computer instructions may be extracted from the book under the MIT License.
Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Published 2020-09-10
Revision History | ||
---|---|---|
Revision 10.0 | 2020-09-10 | Twenty-second Release |
Revision 9.1 | 2020-03-01 | Twenty-first Release |
Revision 9.0 | 2019-09-01 | Twentieth release |
Revision 8.4 | 2019-03-01 | Nineteenth release |
Revision 8.3 | 2018-09-01 | Eighteenth release |
Revision 8.2 | 2018-03-02 | Seventeenth release |
Revision 8.1 | 2017-09-01 | Sixteenth release |
Revision 8.0 | 2017-02-25 | Fifteenth release |
Revision 7.10 | 2016-09-07 | Fourteenth release |
Revision 7.9 | 2016-03-08 | Thirteenth release |
Revision 7.8 | 2015-10-01 | Twelfth release |
Revision 7.7 | 2015-03-06 | Eleventh release |
Revision 7.6 | 2014-09-23 | Tenth release |
Revision 7.5 | 2014-03-05 | Ninth release |
Revision 7.4 | 2013-09-14 | Eighth release |
Revision 6.3 | 2008-08-24 | Seventh release |
Revision 6.2 | 2007-02-14 | Sixth release |
Revision 6.1 | 2005-08-14 | Fifth release |
Revision 6.0 | 2005-04-02 | Fourth release |
Revision 5.1 | 2004-06-05 | Third release |
Revision 5.0 | 2003-11-06 | Second release |
Revision 1.0 | 2003-04-25 | First release |
Abstract
This book follows on from the Linux From Scratch book. It introduces and guides the reader through additions to the system including networking, graphical interfaces, sound support, and printer and scanner support.
Having helped out with Linux From Scratch for a short time, I noticed that we were getting many queries as to how to do things beyond the base LFS system. At the time, the only assistance specifically offered relating to LFS were the LFS hints (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints). Most of the LFS hints are extremely good and well written but I (and others) could still see a need for more comprehensive help to go Beyond LFS — hence BLFS.
BLFS aims to be more than the LFS-hints converted to XML although much of our work is based around the hints and indeed some authors write both hints and the relevant BLFS sections. We hope that we can provide you with enough information to not only manage to build your system up to what you want, whether it be a web server or a multimedia desktop system, but also that you will learn a lot about system configuration as you go.
Thanks as ever go to everyone in the LFS/BLFS community; especially those who have contributed instructions, written text, answered questions and generally shouted when things were wrong!
Finally, we encourage you to become involved in the community; ask questions on the mailing list or news gateway and join in the fun on #lfs and #lfs-support at freenode. You can find more details about all of these in the Introduction section of the book.
Enjoy using BLFS.
Mark Hymers
markh <at> linuxfromscratch.org
BLFS Editor (July 2001–March 2003)
I still remember how I found the BLFS project and started using the instructions that were completed at the time. I could not believe how wonderful it was to get an application up and running very quickly, with explanations as to why things were done a certain way. Unfortunately, for me, it wasn't long before I was opening applications that had nothing more than "To be done" on the page. I did what most would do, I waited for someone else to do it. It wasn't too long before I am looking through Bugzilla for something easy to do. As with any learning experience, the definition of what was easy kept changing.
We still encourage you to become involved as BLFS is never really finished. Contributing or just using, we hope you enjoy your BLFS experience.
Larry Lawrence
larry <at> linuxfromscratch.org
BLFS Editor (March 2003–June 2004)
The BLFS project is a natural progression of LFS. Together, these projects provide a unique resource for the Open Source Community. They take the mystery out of the process of building a complete, functional software system from the source code contributed by many talented individuals throughout the world. They truly allow users to implement the slogan “Your distro, your rules”.
Our goal is to continue to provide the best resource available that shows you how to integrate many significant Open Source applications. Since these applications are constantly updated and new applications are developed, this book will never be complete. Additionally, there is always room for improvement in explaining the nuances of how to install the different packages. To make these improvements, we need your feedback. I encourage you to participate on the different mailing lists, news groups, and IRC channels to help meet these goals.
Bruce Dubbs
bdubbs <at> linuxfromscratch.org
BLFS Editor (June 2004–December 2006 and February 2011–now)
My introduction to the [B]LFS project was actually by accident. I was trying to build a GNOME environment using some how-tos and other information I found on the web. A couple of times I ran into some build issues and Googling pulled up some old BLFS mailing list messages. Out for curiosity, I visited the Linux From Scratch web site and shortly thereafter was hooked. I've not used any other Linux distribution for personal use since.
I can't promise anyone will feel the sense of satisfaction I felt after building my first few systems using [B]LFS instructions, but I sincerely hope that your BLFS experience is as rewarding for you as it has been for me.
The BLFS project has grown significantly the last couple of years. There are more package instructions and related dependencies than ever before. The project requires your input for continued success. If you discover that you enjoy building BLFS, please consider helping out in any way you can. BLFS requires hundreds of hours of maintenance to keep it even semi-current. If you feel confident enough in your editing skills, please consider joining the BLFS team. Simply contributing to the mailing list discussions with sound advice and/or providing patches to the book's XML will probably result in you receiving an invitation to join the team.
Randy McMurchy
randy <at> linuxfromscratch.org
BLFS Editor (December 2006–January 2011)
This version of the book is intended to be used when building on top of a system built using the LFS book. Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy and reliability of the instructions. Many people find that using the instructions in this book after building the current stable or development version of LFS provides a stable and very modern Linux system.
Enjoy!
Randy McMurchy
August 24th, 2008
Last updated on 2020-03-09 08:02:12 -0700
This book is mainly aimed at those who have built a system based on the LFS book. It will also be useful for those who are using other distributions, but for one reason or another want to manually build software and are in need of some assistance. Note that the material contained in this book, in particular the dependency listings, is based upon the assumption that you are using a base LFS system with every package listed in the LFS book already installed and configured. BLFS can be used to create a range of diverse systems and so the target audience is probably nearly as wide as that of the LFS book. If you found LFS useful, you should also like this!
Since Release 7.4, the BLFS book version matches the LFS book version. This book may be incompatible with a previous or later release of the LFS book.
Last updated on 2020-03-09 08:02:12 -0700
This book is divided into the following parts.
This part contains information which is essential to the rest of the book.
Here we introduce basic configuration and security issues. We also discuss a range of editors, file systems, and shells which aren't covered in the main LFS book.
In this section we cover libraries which are often needed by the rest of the book as well as system utilities. Information on Programming (including recompiling GCC to support its full range of languages) concludes this part.
Here we cover how to connect to a network when you aren't using the simple static IP setup given in the main LFS book. Networking libraries and command-line networking tools are also covered here.
Here we deal with setting up mail and other servers (such as FTP, Apache, etc.).
This part explains how to set up a basic X Window System installation along with some generic X libraries and Window managers.
For those who want to use the K Desktop Environment or some parts of it, this part covers it.
GNOME is the main alternative to KDE in the Desktop Environment arena.
Xfce is a lightweight alternative to GNOME and KDE.
LXDE is another lightweight alternative to GNOME and KDE.
Office programs and graphical web browsers are important to most people. They, along with some generic X software can be found in this part of the book.
Here we cover setting multimedia libraries and drivers along with some audio, video and CD-writing programs.
The PST part of the book covers document handling with applications like Ghostscript, CUPS and DocBook to installing texlive.
The Appendices cover information which doesn't belong in the main book; they are mainly there as a reference.
Last updated on 2020-03-09 08:02:12 -0700
The Beyond Linux From Scratch book is designed to carry on from where the LFS book leaves off. But unlike the LFS book, it isn't designed to be followed straight through. Reading the Which sections of the book? part of this chapter should help guide you through the book.
Please read most of this part of the book carefully as it explains quite a few of the conventions used throughout the book.
Unlike the Linux From Scratch book, BLFS isn't designed to be followed in a linear manner. This is because LFS provides instructions on how to create a base system which is capable of turning into anything from a web server to a multimedia desktop system. BLFS attempts to guide you in the process of going from the base system to your intended destination. Choice is very much involved.
Everyone who reads the book will want to read certain sections. The Introduction part, which you are currently reading, contains generic information. Especially take note of the information in Chapter 2, Important Information, as this contains comments about how to unpack software, issues related to using different locales and various other aspects which apply throughout the book.
The part on Post LFS Configuration and Extra Software is where most people will want to turn next. This deals with not just configuration but also Security (Chapter 4, Security), File Systems (Chapter 5, File Systems and Disk Management), Editors (Chapter 6, Editors) and Shells (Chapter 7, Shells). Indeed, you may wish to reference certain parts of this chapter (especially the sections on Editors and File Systems) while building your LFS system.
Following these basic items, most people will want to at least browse through the General Libraries and Utilities part of the book. This part contains information on many items which are prerequisites for other sections of the book as well as some items (such as Chapter 13, Programming) which are useful in their own right. Note that you don't have to install all of these libraries and packages found in this part to start with as each BLFS installation procedure tells you which packages it depends upon so you can choose the program you want to install and see what it needs.
Likewise, most people will probably want to look at the Networking part. It deals with connecting to the Internet or your LAN (Chapter 14, Connecting to a Network) using a variety of methods such as DHCP and PPP, and with items such as Networking Libraries (Chapter 17, Networking Libraries) and various basic networking programs and utilities.
Once you have dealt with these basics, you may wish to configure more advanced network services. These are dealt with in the Servers part of the book. Those wanting to build servers should find a good starting point there. Note that this section also contains information on various database packages.
The next parts of the book principally deal with desktop systems. This portion of the book starts with a part talking about X plus Window and Display Managers. This part also deals with some generic X-based libraries (Chapter 25, X Libraries). After this, KDE and GNOME are given their own parts which are followed by one on X Software.
The book then moves on to deal with Multimedia packages. Note that many people may want to use the ALSA-1.2.2 instructions from this chapter quite near the start of their BLFS journey; they are placed here simply because it is the most logical place for them.
The final part of the main BLFS book deals with Printing, Scanning and Typesetting. This is useful for most people with desktop systems and even those who are creating mainly server systems will find it useful.
We hope you enjoy using BLFS and find it useful.
Last updated on 2012-12-19 11:57:20 -0800
To make things easy to follow, there are a number of conventions used throughout the book. Following are some examples:
./configure --prefix=/usr
This form of text is designed to be typed exactly as seen unless otherwise noted in the surrounding text. It is also used to identify references to specific commands.
install-info: unknown option
`--dir-file=/mnt/lfs/usr/info/dir'
This form of text (fixed width text) is showing screen output, probably a result from issuing a command. It is also used to show filenames such as
/boot/grub/grub.conf
Emphasis
This form of text is used for several purposes in the book but mainly to emphasize important points or to give examples as to what to type.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
This form of text is used for hypertext links external to the book such as HowTos, download locations, websites, etc.
This form of text is used for links internal to the book such as another section describing a different package.
cat > $LFS/etc/group << "EOF"
root:x:0:
bin:x:1:
......
EOF
This type of section is used mainly when creating configuration files. The first command (in bold) tells the system to create the file
$LFS/etc/group
from whatever is typed on the following lines until the sequence EOF is encountered. Therefore, this whole section is generally typed as seen.
<REPLACED
TEXT>
This form of text is used to encapsulate text that should be modified and is not to be typed as seen, or copy and pasted. Note that the square brackets are not part of the text, but should be substituted for as well.
root
This form of text is used to show a specific system user or group reference in the instructions.
When packages are created, the authors depend on prior work. In order to build a package in BLFS, these dependencies must be built prior to the desired package. For each package, any prerequisite packages are listed in one or more separate sections: Required, Recommended, and Optional.
These dependencies are the minimum prerequisite packages required to build the package. Omitted from the list are packages in LFS and required dependencies of other required packages.
These dependencies are those that the BLFS editors have determined are important to give the package reasonable capabilities. Package installation instructions assume they are installed. If a recommended package is not desired, the instructions may need to be modified to accommodate the missing package.
These dependencies are those that the package may use. Integration of optional dependencies may be automatic by the package or may need additional instructions not presented by BLFS. Optional packages may be listed without corresponding BLFS instructions. In this case it is up to the user to determine appropriate installation instructions.
Some packages have specific needs regarding the kernel configuration. The general layout is the following:
Master section --->
Subsection --->
[*] Required parameter [CONFIG_REQU_PAR]
<*> Required parameter (not as module) [CONFIG_REQU_PAR_NMOD]
<*/M> Required parameter (could be a module) [CONFIG_REQU_PAR_MOD]
<*/M/ > Optional parameter [CONFIG_OPT_PAR]
[ ] Incompatible parameter [CONFIG_INCOMP_PAR]
< > Incompatible parameter (even as module) [CONFIG_INCOMP_PAR_MOD]
[CONFIG_...] on the right gives the name of the option, so
you can easily check whether it is set in your config
file. The meaning of the various
entries is:
Master section top level menu item Subsection submenu item Required parameter the option could be either built-in or not selected: it must be selected Required parameter (not as module) the option could be either built-in, module, or not selected: it must be selected as built-in Required parameter (could be a module) the option could be either built-in, module, or not selected: it must be selected, either as built-in or module Optional parameter rarely used: the option could be either built-in, module, or not selected: it may be selected at will Incompatible parameter the option could be either built-in or not selected: it must not be selected Incompatible parameter (even as module) the option could be either built-in, module, or not selected: it must not be selected
Note that, depending on other selections, the angle brackets (<>) may appear as braces ({}), if the option cannot be unselected, or even dashes (-*- or -M-), when the choice is imposed. The help text about the option specifies the other selections on which this option relies, and how those other selections are set.
As in LFS, each package in BLFS has a build time listed in Standard Build Units (SBUs). These times are relative to the time it took to build binutils in LFS and are intended to provide some insight into how long it will take to build a package. Most times listed are for a single processor or core to build the package. In some cases, large, long running builds tested on multi-core systems have SBU times listed with comments such as '(parallelism=4)'. These values indicate testing was done using multiple cores. Note that while this speeds up the build on systems with the appropriate hardware, the speedup is not linear and to some extent depends on the individual package and specific hardware used.
For packages which use ninja (e.g. anything using meson) or rust, by default all cores are used so similar comments will be seen on such packages even when the build time is minimal.
Where even a parallel build takes more than 15 SBU, on certain machines the time may be considerably greater even when the build does not use swap. In particular, different micro-architectures will build some files at different relative speeds and this can introduce delays when certain make targets wait for another file to be created. Where a large build uses a lot of C++ files, processors with Simultaneous Multi Threading will share the Floating Point Unit and can take 45% longer than when using four 'prime' cores (measured on an intel i7 using taskset and keeping the other cores idle).
Some packages do not support parallel builds and using -j1 for the make command is required. Packages that are known to have such limits are marked as such in the text.
Last updated on 2018-09-23 10:06:59 -0700
This is BLFS-BOOK version 10.0 dated September 1st, 2020. This is the 10.0 branch of the BLFS book, currently targeting the LFS 10.0 book. For development versions, if this version is older than a month, it's likely that your mirror hasn't been synchronized recently and a newer version is probably available for download or viewing. Check one of the mirror sites at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/mirrors.html for an updated version.
Last updated on 2016-04-17 13:16:17 -0700
The BLFS project has a number of mirrors set up world-wide to make it easier and more convenient for you to access the website. Please visit the http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/mirrors.html website for the list of current mirrors.
Last updated on 2007-04-04 12:42:53 -0700
Within the BLFS instructions, each package has two references for finding the source files for the package—an HTTP link and an FTP link (some packages may only list one of these links). Every effort has been made to ensure that these links are accurate. However, the World Wide Web is in continuous flux. Packages are sometimes moved or updated and the exact URL specified is not always available.
To overcome this problem, the BLFS Team, with the assistance of Oregon State University Open Source Lab, has made an HTTP/FTP site available through world wide mirrors. See http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/download.html#sources for a list. These sites have all the sources of the exact versions of the packages used in BLFS. If you can't find the BLFS package you need at the listed addresses, get it from these sites.
We would like to ask a favor, however. Although this is a public resource for you to use, please do not abuse it. We have already had one unthinking individual download over 3 GB of data, including multiple copies of the same files that are placed at different locations (via symlinks) to make finding the right package easier. This person clearly did not know what files he needed and downloaded everything. The best place to download files is the site or sites set up by the source code developer. Please try there first.
Last updated on 2017-02-11 20:17:33 -0800
Current release: 10.0 – September 1st, 2020
Changelog Entries:
September 1st, 2020
[bdubbs] - Release of BLFS-10.0.
August 30th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to libreoffice-7.0.0.3. Fixes #13886.
[renodr] - Fix backlight functionality in gnome-settings-daemon.
[renodr] - Prevent installing systemd units from gnome-session on SysV systems.
August 28th, 2020
[renodr] - Prevent VTE from installing systemd units on SysV systems.
[bdubbs] - Update to dash-0.5.11.2. Fixes #13977.
August 27th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Add xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin-0.4.3.
[bdubbs] - Add xfce4-dev-tools-4.14.0.
[bdubbs] - Add keybinder-3.0-03.2.
[bdubbs] - Add pavucontrol-4.0.
[bdubbs] - Update to xterm-359. Fixes #13937.
August 25th, 2020
August 22nd, 2020
August 21st, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to kf5-5.73. Now requires plasma-wayland-protocols. Includes breeze-icons, oxygen-icons, and extra-cmake-modules. Fixes #13646.
August 19th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to x264-20200819. Fixes #7555.
[thomas] - Add qtwebengine-everywhere-src-5.15.0-consolidated_fixes-3.patch. Fixes an issue which glibc version > 2.31.
August 18th, 2020
[dj] - Update to LSB-Tools-0.7.
[dj] - Update to blfs-bootscripts-20200818.
[renodr] - Fix building Inkscape with glibc-2.32.
[pierre] - Update to blocaled-0.3. Fixes #13938.
August 17th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to xf86-video-intel-20200817. Fixes #5918.
[renodr] - Fix the test suite for libxcb.
[renodr] - Adapt Ruby to function properly with glibc-2.32. This is due to lchmod() being added to glibc.
[renodr] - Disable building the libxslt python module since it does not support Python3.
[pierre] - Update to libreoffice-6.4.6.2. Fixes #13930.
[pierre] - Update to boost-1.74.0. Fixes #13928.
[pierre] - Update to vim-8.2.1361. See #12241.
August 16th, 2020
[renodr] - Remove an instruction from OpenLDAP that pointed to a non-existent symlink.
[renodr] - Adapt libarchive test suite to changes in glibc-2.32. Fixes #13933.
[ken] - Archive ImageMagick-6, emacs-27.1 can link to ImageMagick-7. Fixes #13932.
[ken] - Update to sqlite-3.33.0. Fixes #13929.
[ken] - Update to ImageMagick-7.0.10-27. Addresses #7859.
August 15th, 2020
[pierre] - Tweak bind-utils instructions so that manual pages are installed again. Thanks to Joe Locash for the report.
August 14th, 2020
[ken] - Update to dvisvgm-2.10. Fixes #13921.
[ken] - Add missing dependences to dvisvgm (brotli and woff2) which were accidentally omitted when I added dvisvgm in r22343.
[bdubbs] - Update to tumbler-0.3.0. Fixes #13927.
[renodr] - Update to harfbuzz-2.7.1. Fixes #13924.
[renodr] - Update to postgresql-12.4 (Security Update). Fixes #13925.
[renodr] - Update to libinput-1.16.1. Fixes #13926.
August 13th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to nano-5.1. Fixes #13922.
[renodr] - Update to samba-4.12.6. Fixes #13923.
[renodr] - Update to goffice-0.10.48. Fixes #13919.
[renodr] - Update to gnumeric-1.12.48. Fixes #13920.
[renodr] - Update to openldap-2.4.51. Fixes #13918.
[renodr] - Update to wireshark-3.2.6 (Security Update). Fixes #13917.
[renodr] - Update to udisks-2.9.1. Fixes #13916.
[ken] - Tweak the texlive instructions to not report an error from 'let'.
[ken] - Use updated patch in qtwebengine to fix build with current bison.
[xry111] - Revert r23505, and fix the instruction to build texlive with poppler-20.08.
August 12th, 2020
[ken] - Fix texlive build failure with poppler-20.08 by removing instructions to use system poppler.
[renodr] - Adapt the Lua-5.4 sed in VIM to the latest version of VIM.
[ken] - Fix seamonkey build failure with glibc-2.32. Thanks to Pierre for the sed.
[bdubbs] - Update to qemu-5.1.0. Fixes #13914.
[bdubbs] - Update to mariadb-10.5.5. Fixes #13909.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-desktop-3.36.5. Fixes #13907.
[renodr] - Update to mutter-3.36.5. Fixes #13913.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-shell-3.36.5. Fixes #13911.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-shell-extensions-3.36.3. Fixes #13912.
[renodr] - Update to dovecot-2.3.11.3 (security update). Fixes #13915.
[bdubbs] - Update to gtk+3.24.22. Fixes #13905.
[bdubbs] - Update to emacs-27.1. Fixes #13908.
[bdubbs] - Update to pango-1.46.0. Fixes #13906.
[bdubbs] - Update to vala-0.48.9. Fixes #13904.
August 11th, 2020
[renodr] - Reintroduce the Intel Iris Mesa driver.
[renodr] - Fix CVE-2020-14347 in xorg-server. Fixes #13871.
[renodr] - Update to libX11-1.6.11 (Security Fix). Fixes #13870.
[renodr] - Restore the test suite in libnl.
[pierre] - Update to fuse3-3.9.3. Fixes #13902.
[pierre] - Update to LVM2-2.03.10. Fixes #13901.
August 10th, 2020
August 9th, 2020
[ken] - Update to asymptote-2.67. Fixes #13893.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfwm4-4.14.5. Fixes #13900.
[bdubbs] - Remove mention of a deleted file from mc instructions. Fixes #13890.
[bdubbs] - Update to doxygen-1.8.19. Fixes #13898.
[pierre] - Update to file-roller-3.36.3. Fixes #13897.
[pierre] - Update to pipewire-0.3.9. Fixes #13883.
August 8th, 2020
[ken] - Updated to DateTime-1.52, DateTime-Format-Strptime-1.77, DateTime-Locale-1.26, DateTime-TimeZone-2.39, Exporter-Tiny-1.002002, Text-CSV_XS-1.44 (perl module dependencies), part of #13844.
[bdubbs] - Update to php-7.4.9. Fixes #13889.
[bdubbs] - Update to tumbler-0.2.9. Fixes #13890.
[pierre] - Update to thunderbird-78.1.1. Fixes #13896.
[pierre] - Update to evolution- and evolution-data-server-3.36.5. Fixes #13895.
[pierre] - Update to epiphany-3.36.4. Fixes #13891.
August 7th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to polkit-0.117. Fixes #13864.
[bdubbs] - Update to gegl-0.4.26. Fixes #13880.
[pierre] - Update to apache-2.4.46. Fixes #13884.
[bdubbs] - Update to mlt-6.22.1. Fixes #13878.
[bdubbs] - Update to rsync-3.2.3. Fixes #13894.
[bdubbs] - Update to font-alias font-misc-ethiopic 1.0.4 (Xorg fonts). Fixes #13892.
[ken] - Updated to Net-DNS-1.26 (perl module). Fixes #13888.
[ken] - Updated to Specio-0.46, Sub-Quote-2.006006, Test2-Plugin-NoWarnings-0.09, Test-Deep-1.130, IPC-System-Simple-1.30, Test-utf8-1.02 (perl module dependencies), part of #13844.
[ken] - Updated to Clone-0.45 with its new dependency of B-COW-0.004. Also updated to Test-Requires-0.11 (perl module dependencies), part of #13844.
August 6th, 2020
August 4th, 2020
[ken] - Update to at-3.2.1. Fixes #13879.
August 3rd, 2020
August 2nd, 2020
[thomas] - Update to xfwm4-4.14.4. Fixes #13874.
August 1st, 2020
[renodr] - Update to Thunderbird-78.1.0 (Security Update). Fixes #13867.
[ken] - Update to HTTP::Message-6.25, libwww-perl-6.46, TimeDate-2.33 (perl module dependencies), part of #13844.
[thomas] - Update to sysstat-12.4.0. Fixes #13873.
[renodr] - Update to cmake-3.18.1. Fixes #13866.
[renodr] - Update to mlt-6.22.0. Fixes #13868.
[renodr] - Update to libgusb-0.3.5. Fixes #13865.
[renodr] - Update to libvpx-1.9.0. Fixes #13825.
[ken] - Update to Alien::Build-2.26, Alien::Libxml2-0.16, FFI::CheckLib-0.27, Path::Tiny-0.114, Term::Table-0.015, Test2-Suite-0.000130, XML::LibXML-2.0205 (perl module dependencies), part of #13844.
July 31st, 2020
July 30th, 2020
July 29th, 2020
July 28th, 2020
[ken] - Update to Test::MockModule-v0.173.0 andTest::Warnings-0.030 (perl module dependencies), part of #13844.
[pierre] - Update to js-68.11.0. Fixes #13855.
[pierre] - Update to git-2.28.0. Fixes #13852.
[pierre] - Update to libqmi-1.26.2. Fixes #13846.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfwm4-4.14.3. Fixes #13849.
[bdubbs] - Update to postfix-3.5.6. Fixes #13847.
[thomas] - Update to json-c-0.15. Fixes #13845.
[thomas] - Update to uhttpmock-0.5.3. Fixes #13853.
[thomas] - Update to unbound-1.11.0. Fixes #13854.
July 27th, 2020
[ken] - Update to firefox-78.1.0esr (Security fix). Fixes #13851.
July 26th, 2020
[ken] - Remove '--disable-dbus' option from thunderbird, it breaks the build. Therefore, require dbus-glib. Fixes #13843.
July 25th, 2020
July 24th, 2020
[ken] - In firefox, note that clang (llvm-10.0.0) does not accept at least one hardening CFLAG.
[renodr] - Update to node.js-12.18.3. Fixes #13834.
[bdubbs] - Update to nspr-4.27. Fixes #13836.
[bdubbs] - Update to LibRaw-0.20.0. Fixes #13838.
[thomas] - Update to sudo-1.9.2. Fixes #13837.
[renodr] - Update to LLVM-10.0.1. Fixes #13823.
[renodr] - Update to libseccomp-2.5.0. Fixes #13822.
[renodr] - Update to pipewire-0.3.7. Fixes #13831.
July 23rd, 2020
July 22nd, 2020
July 21st, 2020
July 20th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to gnome-disk-utility-3.36.3. Fixes #13821.
July 19th, 2020
July 18th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to BIND and BIND Utilites 9.16.5. Fixes #13808.
[renodr] - Update to cmake-3.18.0. Fixes #13807.
[ken] - Tweak patch for LWP-Protocol-https-6.09 (Perl Module), re #13809.
[bdubbs] - Update to nasm-2.15.03. Fixes #13814.
[bdubbs] - Update to xev-1.2.4 (Xorg Application). Fixes #13816.
July 17th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to Thunderbird-78.0 (Security Update). Fixes #13806.
[bdubbs] - Update to gpgme-1.14.0. Fixes #13813.
[bdubbs] - Update to mpg123-1.26.3. Fixes #13812.
[bdubbs] - Update to libevdev-1.9.1 (Xorg Driver). Fixes #13811.
[bdubbs] - Update to SCons-4.0.1. Fixes #13810.
[bdubbs] - Update to LWP-Protocol-https-6.09 (Perl Module). Fixes #13809.
July 15th, 2020
July 14th, 2020
July 13th, 2020
July 12th, 2020
July 11th, 2020
July 10th, 2020
July 9th, 2020
July 8th, 2020
July 7th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to sendmail-8.16.1. Fixes #13776.
[renodr] - Update to qca-2.3.1. Fixes #13781.
[renodr] - Update to seamonkey-2.53.3 (Security Update). Fixes #13782.
[renodr] - Update to libcap-2.38. Fixes #13765.
[renodr] - Update to dbus-1.12.20 (Security Update). Fixes #13753.
[pierre] - Update to gjs-1.64.4. Fixes #13780.
[pierre] - Update to libgcrypt-1.8.6. Fixes #13779.
July 6th, 2020
July 5th, 2020
July 4th, 2020
July 3rd, 2020
[renodr] - Update to evince-3.36.7. Fixes #13674.
[renodr] - Update to librsvg-2.48.8. Fixes #13673.
[renodr] - Update to evolution-3.36.4. Fixes #13672.
[renodr] - Update to evolution-data-server-3.36.4 (Security Update). Fixes #13762.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-control-center-3.36.4. Fixes #13761.
[renodr] - Update to dhcpcd-9.1.3. Fixes #13759.
[renodr] - Update to nasm-2.15.02. Fixes #13758.
[renodr] - Update to poppler-0.90.0. Fixes #13757.
[renodr] - Update to epiphany-3.36.3. Fixes #13754.
[bdubbs] - Update to libreoffice-6.4.5.2. Fixes #13760.
[bdubbs] - Update to btrfs-progs-v5.7. Fixes #13755.
July 2nd, 2020
July 1st, 2020
June 30th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to libwacom-1.4.1. Fixes #13738.
[renodr] - Update to exiv2-0.27.3 (Security Update). Fixes #13739.
[renodr] - Update to graphviz-2.44.1. Fixes #13740.
[renodr] - Update to unrar-5.9.4. Fixes #13741.
[renodr] - Update to rpcsvc-proto-1.4.2. Fixes #13743.
[renodr] - Update to vala-0.48.7. Fixes #13744.
[renodr] - Update to lua-5.4.0. Fixes #13742.
[renodr] - Adapt httpd to lua-5.4 API changes.
[renodr] - Adapt gvim to lua-5.4 API changes.
[ken] - note that building rustc can now mostly be restricted to a specified number of processors by adding a --jobs switch to each x.py command and also exporting CARGO_BUILD_JOBS= with a value.
[ken] - Pierre discovered that building firefox-78 requires that Python3 has been rebuilt after installing sqlite3.
[pierre] - Add some explanation about cracklib and pwquality to the PAM page and update shadow “important” note about rebuilding after PAM.
June 29th, 2020
[ken] - Update to firefox-78.0esr. If updating from firefox-68esr, please read the wiki entry for firefox first. This version will expect a newer profile, but starting from a term with '--enable-downgrade' to use an existing profile seems to work. [ Security fix ] Fixes #13721.
[renodr] - Update to gtk+-3.24.21. Fixes #13737.
June 28th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to libva-2.8.0. Fixes #13736.
[bdubbs] - Update to postfix-3.5.4. Fixes #13734.
[renodr] - Update to haveged-1.9.13. Fixes #13731.
[renodr] - Update to nasm-2.15.01. Fixes #13732.
[renodr] - Update to py3c-1.2 (Python Module). Fixes #13733.
[renodr] - Update to baobab-3.34.1. Fixes #13735.
June 27th, 2020
June 25th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to mariadb-10.5.4. Fixes #13720.
[renodr] - Update to exempi-2.5.2. Fixes #13715.
[renodr] - Update to guile-3.0.4. Fixes #13714.
[renodr] - Update to nspr-4.26. Fixes #13716.
[renodr] - Update to cbindgen-0.14.3. Fixes #13718.
[renodr] - Update to pycryptodome-3.9.8 (Python Module). Fixes #13719.
June 24th, 2020
[pierre] - Update to popt-1.18. Fixes #13701.
[renodr] - Update to cURL-7.71.0 (security update). Fixes #13712.
[renodr] - Update to ModemManager-1.14.0. Fixes #13710.
[renodr] - Update to libwacom-1.4. Fixes #13708.
[bdubbs] - Update to libjpeg-turbo-2.0.5. Fixes #13709.
[bdubbs] - Update to ntp-4.2.8p15. Fixes #13711.
June 23rd, 2020
[ken] - Update to mutt-1.14.5. Fixes #13707.
[bdubbs] - Archive expect, dejagnu, and tcl which are now included in LFS. Fixes #13697.
[bdubbs] - Update to nfs-utils-2.5.1. Fixes #13704.
[renodr] - Update to harfbuzz-2.6.8. Fixes #13702.
[renodr] - Update to valgrind-3.16.1. Fixes #13703.
[renodr] - Update to rsync-3.2.1. Fixes #13705.
[renodr] - Update to libnma-1.8.30. Fixes #13706.
June 22nd, 2020
June 21st, 2020
June 20th, 2020
June 19th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to alsa-lib-1.2.3.1. Fixes #13693.
[renodr] - Update to evince-3.36.6. Fixes #13682.
[renodr] - Update to haveged-1.9.12. Fixes #13683.
[renodr] - Update to libmbim-1.24.0. Fixes #13685.
[renodr] - Update to desktop-file-utils-0.26. Fixes #13686.
[renodr] - Update to sqlite-3.32.3. Fixes #13688.
[renodr] - Update to libinput-1.15.6. Fixes #13689.
[renodr] - Update to libgweather-3.36.1. Fixes #13691.
[thomas] - Update to sudo-1.9.1. Fixes #13684.
[ken] - Update to mutt-1.14.4 (Security fixes). Fixes #13687.
June 18th, 2020
June 17th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to ffmpeg-4.3. Fixes #13674.
[bdubbs] - Update to iptables-1.8.5. Fixes #13675.
[renodr] - Update to NSS-3.53.1 (security update). Fixes #13676.
[renodr] - Update to lcms2-2.11. Fixes #13677.
[renodr] - Update to pidgin-2.14.1. Fixes #13678.
[renodr] - Update to vlc-3.0.11. Fixes #13679.
June 16th, 2020
June 15th, 2020
[ken] - Add a caution in the Intel microcode section, certain Skylake variants fail to boot with the latest firmware.
[ken] - Update to mutt-1.14.3 (Security fixes, also now requires lynx (or links, with adjustment) to generate manual.txt. Fixes #13672.
[renodr] - Update to twm-1.0.11. Fixes #13670.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-desktop-3.36.3.1. Fixes #13671.
June 13th, 2020
June 12th, 2020
June 11th, 2020
June 10th, 2020
June 9th, 2020
[ken] - Update Intel microcode to 20200609 [security fix]. If you are hosting VMs, please read the ticket to see what is and what is not fixed. Fixes #13656.
[renodr] - Update to evince-3.36.4. Fixes #13655.
[renodr] - Update to xapian-core-1.4.16. Fixes #13652.
[renodr] - Update to Linux-PAM-1.4.0. Fixes #13651.
[renodr] - Move the libpwquality.so library to /lib because it is now used as an authentication module and should be available if /usr is on a separate filesystem.
June 8th, 2020
June 7th, 2020
[ken] - Add a note to rxvt-unicode that it ignores SIGFPE (a perl issue), this causes some tests to fail if using it to build a new LFS system.
[bdubbs] - Update to polkit-cf22af32. Allows use of js68.
[bdubbs] - Update to cups-filters-1.27.5. Fixes #13206.
June 6th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to mercurial-5.4.1. Fixes #13645.
June 5th, 2020
June 4th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to librsvg-2.48.7. Fixes #13639.
[renodr] - Fix a problem in NcFTP caused by GCC-10. Credit goes to Joe Locash for determining the problem and providing a solution.
[renodr] - Update to cogl-1.22.8. Fixes #13638.
[pierre] - Update to asciidoc-9.0.0. Fixes #13404.
[pierre] - Update to thunderbird-68.9.0 (security update). Fixes #13637.
June 3rd, 2020
[renodr] - Update to dbus-1.12.18 (security update). Fixes #13626.
[renodr] - Update to libcap-2.36. Fixes #13627.
[bdubbs] - Update to harfbuzz-2.6.7. Fixes #13636.
[ken] - Use parallel builds for nss-3.53. Fixes #13634.
[renodr] - Update to gnutls-3.6.14 (Security Update). This includes a fix for the expired root certificate (on 5/30/2020) that made several sites inaccessible in Epiphany and other GnuTLS users because of a logic error with regards to using a certificate with the same private key from an alternate vendor. Fixes #13635.
[bdubbs] - Update to xkeyboard-config-2.30. Fixes #13630.
[pierre] - Reinstate system nghttp2 for node.js-12.18.0.
[pierre] - Update to nghttp2-1.41.0 (security fixes). Fixes #13629.
[ken] - Update to node.js-12.18.0 (security fixes). Fixes #13628.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-shell-3.36.3. Fixes #13632.
[renodr] - Update to Mutter-3.36.3. Fixes #13633.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-control-center-3.36.3. Fixes #13631.
June 2nd, 2020
[renodr] - Update to evince-3.36.3. Fixes #13613.
[renodr] - Update to lcms2-2.10. Fixes #13618.
[renodr] - Update to dhcpcd-9.1.0. Fixes #13619.
[renodr] - Update to gjs-1.64.3. Fixes #13620.
[bdubbs] - Update to librsvg-2.48.6. Fixes #13625.
[bdubbs] - Update to git-2.27.0. Fixes #13622.
[bdubbs] - Update to audacious-4.0.4. Fixes #13624.
[pierre] - Update to exim-4.94. Fixes #13623.
[thomas] - Update to dash-0.5.11. Fixes #13621.
June 1st, 2020
[renodr] - Update to librsvg-2.48.5. Fixes #13597.
[renodr] - Update to NSS-3.53. Fixes #13599.
[bdubbs] - Update to icewm-1.6.6. Fixes #13605.
[bdubbs] - Update to mpg123-1.26.1. Fixes #13615.
[bdubbs] - Update to proftpd-1.3.6d. Fixes #13612.
[bdubbs] - Update to pciutils-3.7.0. Fixes #13611.
[bdubbs] - Update to libqmi-1.24.14. Fixes #13610.
[ken] - Update to firefox-68.9.0 (security fixes), also used for JS68. Fixes #13609.
[thomas] - Update to fetchmail-6.4.6. Fixes #13603.
May 31st, 2020
[bdubbs] - Add a style element to css file to make the html navigation header 'sticky' instead of scrolling.
May 30th, 2020
[thomas] - Update to xarchiver-0.5.4.15. Fixes #13614.
[bdubbs] - Update to x265-3.4. Fixes #13608.
[bdubbs] - Update to feh-3.4.1. Fixes #13607.
[bdubbs] - Update to Mako-1.1.3 (Python Module). Fixes #13602.
[bdubbs] - Update to libgpg-error-1.38. Fixes #13600.
[thomas] - Update to vte-0.60.3. Fixes #13598.
[pierre] - Update to epiphany-3.36.2. Fixes #13596.
[pierre] - Update to gnome-system-monitor-3.36.1. Fixes #13594.
[pierre] - Update to nautilus-3.36.3. Fixes #13593.
[pierre] - Update to evolution and evolution-data-server 3.36.3. Fixes #13592.
May 29th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to amtk-5.1.1. Fixes #13591.
[renodr] - Update to NetworkManager-1.24.2 (security update). Fixes #13595.
[thomas] - Upgrade subversion-1.14.0. Drop description of Python2 bindings. Fixes #13584.
[thomas] - Make swig use Python3.
[thomas] - Add Python module py3c-1.1 (needed by subversion).
May 28th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to glib-networking-2.64.3. Fixes #13589.
[renodr] - Update to babl-0.1.76. Fixes #13582.
[renodr] - Update to cryptsetup-2.3.3. Fixes #13587.
[renodr] - Update to Valgrind-3.16.0. Fixes #13585.
[renodr] - Update to cmake-3.17.3. Fixes #13588.
[renodr] - Update to poppler-0.89.0. Fixes #13586.
[renodr] - Update to Net-DNS-1.24. Fixes #13583.
[ken] - Adapt vlc-3.0.10 for changes in Qt-5.15.
[thomas] - Upgrade to openssh-8.3p1. Fixes #13580.
May 27th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to HTTP-Daemon-6.10 (Perl Module). Fixes #13578.
[renodr] - Update to Node.JS-12.17.0. Reinstates system ICU as well. Fixes #13576.
[renodr] - Update to udisks-2.9.0. Fixes #13577.
[renodr] - Update to libdrm-2.4.102. Fixes #13579.
[renodr] - Adapt Falkon to build with Qt-5.15.
[renodr] - Update to Qt and QtWebEngine-5.15.0. Fixes #13575.
[pierre] - Update to vim-8.2.0814 to sync with lfs.
May 26th, 2020
May 25th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to thunar-1.8.15. Fixes #13573.
May 24th, 2020
May 23rd, 2020
May 22nd, 2020
May 21st, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to ffmpeg-4.2.3. Fixes #13564.
[bdubbs] - Update to v4l-utils-1.20.0. Fixes #13563.
[bdubbs] - Update to six-1.15.0 (Python module). Fixes #13561.
[bdubbs] - Update to libbytesize-2.3. Fixes #13560.
[pierre] - Patch jfsutils to avoid the use of -fcommon.
[pierre] - Patch transcode to avoid the use of -fcommon.
[renodr] - Update to dovecot-2.3.10.1 (Security Update). Fixes #13545.
[renodr] - Update to balsa-2.5.11. Fixes #13521.
[renodr] - Update to goffice-0.10.47. Fixes #13518.
[renodr] - Update to gnumeric-1.12.47. Fixes #13519.
[bdubbs] - Update to wireshark-3.2.4. Fixes #13558.
[bdubbs] - Update to glib-2.64.3. Fixes #13559.
May 20th, 2020
May 19th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to kf5 packages kio-5.70.1, ktexteditor-5.70.1, and plasma-framework-5.70.1 in non-scheduled updates.
[bdubbs] - Update to xf86-input-libinput-0.30.0. Fixes #13549.
[bdubbs] - Update to unbound-1.10.1. Fixes #13551.
[bdubbs] - Update to uhttpmock-0.5.2. Fixes #13547.
[renodr] - Update to Samba-4.12.3. Fixes #13552.
[thomas] - Update bind-9.16.3 and bind-utils-9.16.3. Fixes #13550.
[pierre] - Add a patch to freeglut to avoid the use of -fcommon.
[pierre] - Add a patch to lxtask to avoid the use of -fcommon.
[pierre] - Add a patch to menu-cache to fix a memory leak and avoid the use of -fcommon.
[pierre] - Fix vinagre to avoid the use of -fcommon.
[pierre] - Two fixes for sharutils: prevent a heap overflow and avoid the use of -fcommon.
May 18th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to gnome-logs-3.36.1. Fixes #13528.
[renodr] - Update to gfbgraph-0.2.4. Fixes #13544.
[renodr] - Update to evince-3.36.1. Fixes #13548.
[pierre] - Update to Xorg Intel Driver-20200518. Fixes a "multiple definition" error with GCC 10.
[bdubbs] - Update to vala-0.48.6. Fixes #13546.
[bdubbs] - Update to postfix-3.5.2. Fixes #13543.
[renodr] - Fix an installation problem in gjs caused by trying to create a symlink before it's origin is installed.
[thomas] - Update to libuv-1.38.0. Fixes #13542.
May 17th, 2020
May 16th, 2020
[renodr] - Fix a regression in Udisks2 caused by glib-2.64. This is primarily due to encoding API changes.
[pierre] - Patch libreoffice to build with GCC 10.
[pierre] - Patch boost to allow building libreoffice with GCC 10.
[pierre] - Fix rox-filer for GCC 10.
[pierre] - Fix vsftpd for GCC 10. Thanks to Thomas Trepl for the sed.
[bdubbs] - Update to postgresql-12.3. Fixes #13540.
[bdubbs] - Update to php-7.4.6. Fixes #13538.
[bdubbs] - Update to Python-3.8.3. Fixes #13539.
[bdubbs] - Update to highlight-3.57. Fixes #13537.
May 15th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to mesa-20.0.7. Fixes #13536.
[bdubbs] - Update to sysstat-12.3.3. Fixes #13517.
[bdubbs] - Update to plasma5-5.18.5. Fixes #13191.
[bdubbs] - Update to kf5-apps-20.04.1 including kwave and kate. Fixes #13217.
[bdubbs] - Update to mariadb-10.4.13. Fixes #13531.
[renodr] - Update to libqmi-1.24.12. Fixes #13514.
[renodr] - Update to ModemManager-1.12.10. Fixes #13516.
[pierre] - Fix building libmusicbrainz-5.10 with cmake-3.17.
[thomas] - Update to apache-ant-1.10.8. Fixes #13533.
May 14th, 2020
[renodr] - Fix gst-plugins-bad so that it detects neon properly at build-time.
[bdubbs] - Update to polkit-qt-1-0.113.0. Fixes #13436.
[bdubbs] - Update to kf5-5.70.0. Fixes #13235.
[pierre] - Update to xarchiver-0.5.4.14. Fixes #13535.
[pierre] - Fix building transcode with GCC-10.
[pierre] - Fix building vinagre with GCC-10.
[pierre] - Fix building dhcp with GCC-10. From a patch by Xi Ruoyao.
[pierre] - Fix building menu-cache with GCC-10.
[pierre] - Fix building lxtask with GCC-10.
May 13th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to libmypaint-1.6.1. Fixes #13525.
[renodr] - Fix building Sawfish with GCC-10.
[pierre] - Update to Java(32 bit) 14.0.1+7. Fixes #13530.
[renodr] - Remove invalid dependency from gdk-pixbuf. Fixes #13529.
[pierre] - Fix the build of xine-lib with GCC-10.
[pierre] - Update to Java(64 bit) and Openjdk 14.0.1+7. Java 32 still pending. Partially fixes #13530.
[renodr] - Fix the build of xf86-video-amdgpu with GCC-10.
May 12th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to harfbuzz-2.6.6. Fixes #13527.
[ken] - Update to mutt-1.14.0. Fixes #13493.
[bdubbs] - Fix building p7zip with gcc 10. Also addresses several exiting security issues.
[renodr] - Adapt valgrind to changes in GCC-10.
[thomas] - Upgrade to sudo-1.9.0. Fixes #13524.
[thomas] - Upgrade to pcre2-10.35. Fixes #13520.
[thomas] - Upgrade btrfs-progs to 5.6.1. Fixes #13512.
[thomas] - Upgrade freetype to 2.10.2. Fixes #13515.
[pierre] - Fix building cpio with gcc 10.
[pierre] - Fix building freeglut with gcc 10.
[pierre] - Fix building intel-vaapi-driver with gcc 10.
[thomas] - Added a patch to fix building qtwebengine-5.14.2 with GCC-10. It also enables using system ICU again.
May 11th, 2020
[ken] - Update to fontforge-20200314 (security fixes). Fixes #13488.
[renodr] - Update to c-ares-1.16.1. Fixes #13522.
[bdubbs] - Update to postfix-3.5.1. Fixes #13523.
[ken] - Added libspiro and libuninameslist to the book. Addresses part of #13488.
[ken] - Reinstate link-shared in config.toml for rustc, it had fallen out. Thanks to Pierre for noticing.
[thomas] - Added a patch to fix building QT-5.14.2 with GCC-10.
[thomas] - Fix building xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-intel with GCC-10.
[pierre] - Update to libcap-pam-2.34. Fixes #13497.
May 10th, 2020
[thomas] - Fix building ntp with GCC-10.
[pierre] - Make a consolidated patch for gpm.
[pierre] - Update to gcc-10.1.0. Partially fixes #13511.
May 9th, 2020
[pierre] - Fix building gpm with GCC 10.
May 8th, 2020
May 7th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to shared-mime-info-2.0. Fixes #13510.
May 6th, 2020
May 5th, 2020
[renodr] - Added double-conversion to the book. Fixes #13504.
[renodr] - Added gdl to the book. Fixes #13503.
[renodr] - Update to Inkscape-1.0. Fixes #13501.
[renodr] - Update to faad2-2.9.2. Fixes #13502.
[renodr] - Update to gdm-3.36.2. Fixes #13499.
[thomas] - Update to xfce4-notifyd-0.6.1. Fixes #13500.
May 4th, 2020
[renodr] - Fix a build failure in cyrus-sasl.
[ken] - Update to firefox-68.8.0 (security fixes), also used for JS68. Fixes #13498.
May 3rd, 2020
[renodr] - Update to Seamonkey-2.53.2 (security update). Fixes #13495.
[renodr] - Update to GTK+-3.24.20. Revert back to autotools per upstream's recommendations, and include the scrollbar button fix in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css. Fixes #13459.
[bdubbs] - Update to v4l-utils-1.18.1. Fixes #13496.
[thomas] - Upgrade xterm-356. Fixes #13494.
May 2nd, 2020
May 1st, 2020
[renodr] - Document test suite issues in GDB with AMD processors.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfwm4-4.14.2. Fixes #13487.
[renodr] - Update to soundtouch-2.1.2. Fixes #13483.
[renodr] - Update to cbindgen-0.14.2. Fixes #13484.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-control-center-3.36.2. Fixes #13485.
[renodr] - Update to pipewire-0.3.4. Fixes #13486.
[renodr] - Fix a regression in gnome-shell that causes crashes with some extensions, such as dash-to-panel, enabled.
April 30th, 2020
[pierre] - Document options to prevent elogind to kill all user processes when the user logs out. This recovers the traditional behavior of commands like nohup or screen.
[renodr] - Update to cryptsetup-2.3.2. Fixes #13482.
[renodr] - Update to libmypaint-1.6.0. Fixes #13480.
[renodr] - Update to mesa-20.0.6. Fixes #13479.
April 29th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to gnome-settings-daemon-3.36.1. Fixes #13477.
[renodr] - Update to gsettings-desktop-schemas-3.36.1. Fixes #13478.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-shell-extensions-3.36.2. Fixes #13476.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-shell-3.36.2. Fixes #13474.
[renodr] - Update to mutter-3.36.2. Fixes #13475.
[thomas] - Update to audacious/-plugins-4.0.3. Fixes #13473.
[renodr] - Update to node.js-12.16.3. Fixes #13467.
[bdubbs] - Update to qemu-5.0.0. Fixes #13465.
[renodr] - Update to OpenLDAP-2.4.50. Fixes #13469.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-desktop-3.36.2. Fixes #13470.
[renodr] - Update to curl-7.70.0. Fixes #13471.
[renodr] - Update to boost-1.73.0. Fixes #13466.
[thomas] - Update to cmake-3.17.2. Fixes #13468.
[thomas] - Remove switch -webengine-icu from qtwebengine instructions as current qtwebengine (5.14.2) does not compile against ICU-67.1.
April 28th, 2020
[thomas] - Update to fetchmail-6.4.4. Fixes #13456.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfce4-panel-4.14.4. Fixes #13462.
[renodr] - Update to gjs-1.64.2. Fixes #13461.
[renodr] - Update to cups-2.3.3 (security update). Fixes #13464.
[renodr] - Update to samba-4.12.2 (security update). Fixes #13463.
[thomas] - Update to poppler-0.88.0. Fixes #13460.
April 27th, 2020
April 25th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to gnome-user-docs-3.36.2. Fixes #13455.
[ken] - Add tlpdb tarball to install of texlive source. Fixes #13445.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-terminal-3.36.2. Fixes #13454.
[renodr] - Update to vte-0.60.2. Fixes #13453.
[renodr] - Update to gedit-3.36.2. Fixes #13452.
[renodr] - Update to eog-3.36.2. Fixes #13451.
[renodr] - Update to dconf-editor-3.36.2. Fixes #13450.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-maps-3.36.2. Fixes #13449.
[renodr] - Update to WebKitGTK+-2.28.2. Fixes #13447.
[renodr] - Update to evolution-data-server-3.36.2. Part of #13446.
[renodr] - Update to evolution-3.36.2. Fixes #13446.
April 24th, 2020
April 22nd, 2020
April 21st, 2020
April 20th, 2020
April 19th, 2020
April 18th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to php-7.4.5. Fixes #13425.
April 17th, 2020
April 16th, 2020
[thomas] - Update to bind-9.16.2, bind-utils-9.16.2. Fixes #13423.
April 15th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to libuv-v1.36.0. Fixes #13422.
[renodr] - Update to audacious/audacious-plugins 4.0.2. Fixes #13419.
[renodr] - Update to libsecret-0.20.3. Fixes #13416.
[renodr] - Update to glib-networking-2.64.2. Fixes #13415.
[renodr] - Update to dhcpcd-9.0.1. Fixes #14313.
[renodr] - Update to krb5-1.18.1. Fixes #13409.
[bdubbs] - Update to faac-1_30. Fixes #13420.
[bdubbs] - Update to faad2-2_9_1. Fixes #13421.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfsprogs-5.6.0. Fixes #13418.
April 14th, 2020
[ken] - Update to git-2.26.1 (security fix). Fixes #13417.
[bdubbs] - Update to xorgproto-2020.1. Fixes #13414.
[bdubbs] - Update to doxygen-1.8.18. Fixes #13412.
[bdubbs] - Update to Jinja2-2.11.2 (Python Module). Fixes #13411.
[bdubbs] - Update to glm-0.9.9.8. Fixes #13410.
[bdubbs] - Update to libsass-3.6.3. Fixes #12875.
April 13th, 2020
April 12th, 2020
[ken] - Update to texlive-20200406. Fixes #13394.
April 11th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to libyaml-0.2.3. Fixes #13402.
[renodr] - Update to feh-3.4. Fixes #13403.
[renodr] - Update to VLC-3.0.9.2. Fixes #13400.
[renodr] - Update to libqmi-1.24.10. Fixes #13395.
[renodr] - Update to cbindgen-0.14.1. Fixes #13397.
[renodr] - Update the pdfbox/fontbox packages in fop to 2.0.19. Fixes #13401.
[bdubbs] - Update to libvdpau-1.4. Fixes #13399.
[bdubbs] - Update to libinput-1.15.5. Fixes #13398.
[thomas] - Update to sysstat-12.3.2. Fixes #13396.
April 10th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to libtirpc-1.2.6. Fixes #13393.
[renodr] - Update to qpdf-10.0.1. Fixes #13392.
[renodr] - Update to gtk+-3.24.18. Fixes #13390.
[renodr] - Update to graphviz-2.44.0. Fixes #13379.
[renodr] - Update to cmake-3.17.1. Fixes #13389.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-weather-3.36.1. Fixes #13391.
April 9th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to librsvg-2.48.3. Fixes #13388.
[renodr] - Update to glib-2.64.2. Fixes #13386.
[renodr] - Update to node.js-12.16.2. Fixes #13378.
[bdubbs] - Clarify naming of docbook xml and dtd pages.
[bdubbs] - Update to libva-2.7.0. Fixes #13387.
[timtas] - Update to thunderbird-68.7.0. Fixes #13381.
[thomas] - Update to wireshark-3.2.3. Fixes #13380.
April 8th, 2020
[thomas] - Update to xfce4-notifyd-0.6.0. Fixes #13376.
April 7th, 2020
April 6th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to gnome-weather-3.36.0. Fixes #13370.
[renodr] - Update to vala-0.48.3. Fixes #13369.
[renodr] - Update to audacious and audacious-plugins 4.0.1. Fixes #13367.
[bdubbs] - Update to btrfs-progs-5.6. Fixes #13365.
[ken] - Update to firefox-68.7.0 (security fixes), also used for JS68. Fixes #13368.
[ken] - Let our cairo snapshot build with automake-1.16.2. Fixes #13364.
April 5th, 2020
April 4th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to opencv and opencv_contrib 4.3.0. Fixes #13357.
[bdubbs] - Update to mesa-20.0.4. Fixes #13343.
[bdubbs] - Update to graphite2-1.3.14. Fixes #13339.
[bdubbs] - Update to libdrm-2.4.101. Fixes #13358.
[bdubbs] - Update to vim-8.2.0486. Fixes #13356.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-weather-3.34.1. Fixes #13359.
[timtas] - Update to dhcpcd-9.0.0. Fixes #13352.
[ken] - Use firefox-68.6.1 for JS68. Addresses #13355.
April 3rd, 2020
[ken] - Update to firefox-68.6.1 (security fixes). Fixes #13354.
[bdubbs] - Update to gtk+-3.24.17. Fixes #13253.
[bdubbs] - Update to mercurial-5.3.2. Fixes #13251.
[bdubbs] - Update to atk-2.36.0. Fixes #13245.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-terminal-3.36.1.1. Finishes #13243.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-system-monitor-3.36.0. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-screenshot-3.36.0. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-maps-3.36.1. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-disk-utility-3.36.1. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-calculator-3.36.0. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to file-roller-3.36.1. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to evolution-3.36.1. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to Evince-3.36.0. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to EOG-3.36.1. Part of #13243.
[thomas] - Update to qt-5.14.2, qtwebengine-5.14.2. Fixes #13342.
April 2nd, 2020
[renodr] - Update to yelp-3.36.0. Finishes #13242.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-user-docs-3.36.1. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-session-3.36.0. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-shell-extensions-3.36.1. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Archived libcroco.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-shell-3.36.1. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to mutter-3.36.1. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-control-center-3.36.1. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-color-manager-3.36.0. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to network-manager-applet-1.16.0. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Moved network-manager-applet to Networking Utilities.
[renodr] - Added graphene to the book. Fixes #13347.
[renodr] - Added libnma to the book. Fixes #13346.
[renodr] - Moved polkit-gnome to Security. Fixes #13350.
[renodr] - Moved notification-daemon to System Utilites. Fixes #13349.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-settings-daemon-3.36.0. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Added the test suite to libgudev.
[renodr] - Added umockdev. Fixes #13348.
[thomas] - Update to nano-4.9.1. Fixes #13334.
April 1st, 2020
[renodr] - Update to librsvg-2.48.2. Fixes #13336.
[renodr] - Add a patch to IBUS to allow it to function in Wayland-based desktop environments such as gnome.
[renodr] - Reinstate system LLVM in Rust.
[bdubbs] - Update to ruby-2.7.1. Fixes #13341.
[bdubbs] - Update to httpd-2.4.43. Fixes #13332.
[bdubbs] - Update to gnutls-3.6.13. Fixes #13337.
[bdubbs] - Update to IO-Socket-SSL-2.068 (Perl Module). Fixes #13340.
[bdubbs] - Update to unrar-5.9.2. Fixes #13331.
March 31st, 2020
[renodr] - Update to bubblewrap-0.4.1 (Security Update). Fixes #13330.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-bluetooth-3.34.1. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to Nautilus-3.36.1.1. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to gvfs-1.44.1. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-backgrounds-3.36.0. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-desktop-3.36.1. Fixes #13335.
[renodr] - Update to tracker-miners-2.3.3. Finishes #13241.
[renodr] - Update to dconf-editor-3.36.0. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to dconf-0.36.0. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to tracker-2.3.4. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to folks-0.14.0. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to evolution-data-server-3.36.1. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to libwnck-3.36.0. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to libpeas-1.26.0. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-online-accounts-3.36.0. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to libgweather-3.36.0. Part of #13241.
March 30th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to gnome-menus-3.36.0. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to geocode-glib-3.26.2. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to yelp-xsl-3.36.0. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to vte-0.60.1. Part of #13241.
[ken] - Update to rustc-1.42.0 and patch seamonkey for this. Thanks to Bruce, Pierre and Uwe for their help. Fixes #13321.
[bdubbs] - Update to xorg-server-1.20.8. Fixes #13329.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfce4-terminal-0.8.9.2. Fixes #13328.
March 29th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to epiphany-3.36.1. Finishes #13244.
[renodr] - Update to seahorse-3.36.0. Part of #13243.
[renodr] - Update to libhandy-0.0.13. Part of #13244.
[renodr] - Update to libdazzle-3.36.0. Part of #13244.
[renodr] - Update to gnome-keyring-3.36.0. Part of #13242.
[renodr] - Update to libsecret-0.20.2. Part of #13241.
[bdubbs] - Update to poppler-0.87.0. Fixes #13326.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfce4-session-4.14.2. Fixes #13325.
March 28th, 2020
March 27th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to librsvg-2.48.1. Fixes #13322.
[ken] - Use the shipped copy of llvm when building rustc-1.39.0, instead of system llvm because it fails to build with llvm-10.0.. Fixes #13320.
[renodr] - Update to glib-networking-2.64.1. Fixes #13323.
[bdubbs] - Update to gtk+-3.24.16. Fixes #13319.
[bdubbs] - Update to LVM2.2.03.09. Fixes #13311.
[bdubbs] - Update to pipewire-0.3.2. Fixes #13312.
[bdubbs] - Update to guile-3.0.2. Fixes #13315.
[bdubbs] - Update to neon-0.31.0. Fixes #13310.
[bdubbs] - Update to libgsf-1.14.47. Fixes #13309.
[bdubbs] - Update to vala-0.48.2. Fixes #13307.
[bdubbs] - Update to libsigc++-2.10.3. Fixes #13306.
[renodr] - Update to gedit-3.36.1. Part of #13244.
[renodr] - Added uchardet. Fixes #13318.
[renodr] - Added amtk. Fixes #13317.
{renodr] - Added tepl. Fixes #13316.
March 26th, 2020
March 25th, 2020
[renodr] - Update to libsoup-2.70.0. Part of #13244.
[renodr] - Update to glib-networking-2.64.0. Part of #13244.
[renodr] - Update to gsettings-desktop-schemas-3.36.0. Part of #13241.
[renodr] - Update to pipewire-0.3.1. Part of #13244.
[bdubbs] - Update to sane-frontends-1.0.14. Fixes #13303.
[bdubbs] - Update to libwacom-1.3. Fixes #13305.
[bdubbs] - Remove a2ps and psutils. Fixes #13300.
[bdubbs] - Update to thunar-1.8.14. Fixes #13304.
[bdubbs] - Update to llvm-10.0.0. Fixes #13302.
March 24th, 2020
March 23rd, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to thunar-1.8.13. Fixes #13298.
[bdubbs] - Update to thunderbird-68.6.0. Fixes #13264.
[bdubbs] - Update to git-2.26.0. Fixes #13297.
[bdubbs] - Update to glibmm-2.64.2. Fixes #13296.
[bdubbs] - Update to ghostscript-9.52. Fixes #13265.
[bdubbs] - Update to NetworkManager-1.22.10. Fixes #13261.
[bdubbs] - Update to cryptsetup-2.3.1. Fixes #13261.
March 22nd, 2020
March 21st, 2020
[renodr] - Update to libreoffice-6.4.2.2. Fixes #13201.
[ken] - Update to dvisvgm-2.9.1. Fixes #13268.
[bdubbs] - Update to Business-ISSN-1.004 (Perl Module). Fixes #13283.
[bdubbs] - Update to gmime-3.2.7. Fixes #13292.
[bdubbs] - Update to pangomm-2.42.1. Fixes #13291.
[bdubbs] - Update to cmake-3.17.0. Fixes #13290.
[bdubbs] - Update to cbindgen-0.13.2. Fixes #13289.
[bdubbs] - Update to xscreensaver-5.44. Fixes #13288.
[bdubbs] - Update to gnupg-2.2.20. Fixes #13287.
[bdubbs] - Update to bind9 and bind 9.16.1. Fixes #13286.
[bdubbs] - Update to php-7.4.4. Fixes #13285.
[bdubbs] - Update to PyYAML-5.3.1 (Python Module). Fixes #13284.
[bdubbs] - Update to libinput-1.15.4. Fixes #13281.
[renodr] - Update to gcc-9.3.0. Fixes #13260.
March 19th, 2020
March 18th, 2020
March 17th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to icewm-1.6.5. Fixes #13274.
[bdubbs] - Update to bluez-5.54. Fixes #13273.
[bdubbs] - Update to libqmi-1.24.8. Fixes #13272.
[ken] - Adjust seamonkey-2.53.0 to build with rustc-1.39.0. Fixes #13271.
[ken] - Update to librsvg-2.48.0, and hence update to rustc-1.39.0. Fixes #13230.
March 16th, 2020
March 15th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to curl-7.69.1. Fixes #13259.
[bdubbs] - Update to Archive-Zip-1.68 (Perl Module). Fixes #13262.
[bdubbs] - Update to vala-0.48.1. Fixes #13258.
[bdubbs] - Update to libuv-v1.35.0. Fixes #13257.
[bdubbs] - Update to icu-66_1. Fixes #13256.
[bdubbs] - Update to webkitgtk-2.28.0. Fixes #13253.
[bdubbs] - Update to SDL2-2.0.12. Fixes #13254.
March 12th, 2020
[pierre] - Update to elogind-243.7 again (stealth update). Fixes #13154.
March 10th, 2020
[ken] - Update to firefox-68.6.0 (security fixes). Fixes #13250.
[bdubbs] - Update to cogl-1.22.6. Fixes #13252.
[bdubbs] - Update to clutter-1.26.4. Fixes #13251.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfce4-power-manager-1.6.6. Fixes #13249.
[bdubbs] - Update to adwaita-icon-theme-3.36.0. Fixes #13248.
[bdubbs] - Update to guile-3.0.1. Fixes #13246.
[bdubbs] - Update to libical-3.0.8. Fixes #13238.
[bdubbs] - Update to gobject-introspection-1.64.0. Fixes #13237.
March 9th, 2020
[ken] - Update to asymptote-2.64. Fixes #13220.
[bdubbs] - Update to pygobject-3.36.0. Fixes #13247.
[bdubbs] - Update to Pygments-2.6.1. Fixes #13245.
[bdubbs] - Update to pyatspi-2.36.0. Fixes #13239.
[bdubbs] - Update to at-spi2-core-2.36.0. Fixes #13240.
[bdubbs] - Update to xfburn-0.6.2. Fixes #13236.
[timtas] - Update to dovecot-2.3.10. Fixes #13233.
March 8th, 2020
[dj] - Update to make-ca-1.7.
March 7th, 2020
March 5th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to mercurial-5.3.1. Fixes #13226.
[bdubbs] - Update to cmake-3.16.5. Fixes #13225.
[bdubbs] - Update to glib-2.64.0. Fixes #13224.
[pierre] - Update to wireshark-3.2.2. Fixes #13193.
[pierre] - Update to elogind-243.7. Fixes #13154.
[pierre] - Add a patch for mutter to allow building with mesa-20.x.
March 4th, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to bind-utils and bind-9.16.0. Fixes #13170.
[bdubbs] - Update to sg3_utils-1.45. Fixes #13216.
[bdubbs] - Update to curl-7.69.0. Fixes #13223.
[bdubbs] - Update to ntp-4.2.8p14. Fixes #13221.
[bdubbs] - Update to vala-0.48.0. Fixes #13219.
[bdubbs] - Update to fribidi-1.0.9. Fixes #13215.
[bdubbs] - Update to php-7.4.3. Fixes #13176.
[bdubbs] - Update to cryptsetup-2.3.0. Fixes #13198.
[bdubbs] - Update to NetworkManager-1.22.8. Fixes #13159.
[bdubbs] - Update to glib-2.62.5. Fixes #13158.
[renodr] - Update to qca-2.3.0. Fixes #13189.
[renodr] - Update to poppler-0.86.1. Fixes #13204.
[pierre] - Add a patch for cogl to allow building with mesa-20.x.
March 3rd, 2020
March 2nd, 2020
[bdubbs] - Update to libinput-1.15.2. Fixes #13171.
[bdubbs] - Update to libevdev-1.9.0. Fixes #13212.
[bdubbs] - Update to xkbcomp-1.4.3 (Xorg App). Fixes #13174.
[bdubbs] - Update to mesa-20.0.0. Fixes #13172.
[bdubbs] - Update to wayland-protocols-1.20. Fixes #13208.
[bdubbs] - Update to libxcb-1.14. Fixes #13184.
[bdubbs] - Update to xcb-proto-1.14. Fixes #13183.
[bdubbs] - Update to Mako-1.1.2 (Python Module). Fixes #13214.
[bdubbs] - Update to pycairo-1.19.1 (Python Module). Fixes #13177.
[bdubbs] - Update to pycryptodome-3.9.7 (Python Module). Fixes #13182.
[bdubbs] - Update to decorator-4.4.2 (Python Module). Fixes #13210.
[bdubbs] - Update to Python-3.8.2. Fixes #13190.
[bdubbs] - Update to libcap-2.33. Fixes #13143.
[bdubbs] - Update to rpcsvc-proto-1.4.1. Fixes #13168.
[renodr] - Update to alsa-lib, alsa-plugins, alsa-tools, and alsa-utils 1.2.2. Fixes #13173.
[renodr] - Update to unbound-1.10.0. Fixes #13178.
[renodr] - Update to at-spi2-atk-2.34.2. Fixes #13207.
[renodr] - Update to logrotate-3.16.0. Fixes #13205>.
[renodr] - Update to libqmi-1.24.4. Fixes #13200.
[renodr] - Update to libgdata-0.17.12. Fixes #13197.
[renodr] - Update to libmypaint-1.5.1. Fixes #13187.
[renodr] - Update to ibus-1.5.22. Fixes #13181.
[renodr] - Update to avahi-0.8. Fixes #13164.
[renodr] - Update to git-2.25.1. Fixes #13155.
[bdubbs] - Update to ed-1.16. Fixes #13185.
[bdubbs] - Update to List-AllUtils-0.16 (Perl Module). Fixes #13209.
[renodr] - Update to lxsession-0.5.5. Fixes #13211.
[renodr] - Update to totem-pl-parser-3.26.5. Fixes #13203.
[renodr] - Update to libsoup-2.68.4. Fixes #13188.
[renodr] - Update to enchant-2.2.8. Fixes #13199.
[renodr] - Update to geoclue-2.5.6. Fixes #13194.
[renodr] - Update to libnotify-0.7.9. Fixes #13192.
[renodr] - Update to libgusb-0.3.4. Fixes #13175.
March 1st, 2020
[bdubbs] - Release of BLFS-9.1.
Last updated on 2020-08-31 19:46:15 -0700
The linuxfromscratch.org server is hosting a number of mailing lists that are used for the development of the BLFS book. These lists include, among others, the main development and support lists.
For more information regarding which lists are available, how to subscribe to them, archive locations, etc., visit http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/mail.html.
Last updated on 2007-04-04 12:42:53 -0700
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The following are the rules for posting:
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Suggestions to change the book should be made by creating a new ticket, not by making comments in the Wiki.
Questions with your specific installation problems should be made by subscribing and mailing to the BLFS Support Mailing List at mailto:blfs-support AT linuxfromscratch D0T org.
Discussions of build instructions should be made by subscribing and mailing to the BLFS Development List at mailto:blfs-dev AT linuxfromscratch D0T org.
Inappropriate material will be removed.
Last updated on 2007-04-04 12:42:53 -0700
If you encounter a problem while using this book, and your problem is not listed in the FAQ (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq), you will find that most of the people on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and on the mailing lists are willing to help you. An overview of the LFS mailing lists can be found in Mailing lists. To assist us in diagnosing and solving your problem, include as much relevant information as possible in your request for help.
Before asking for help, you should review the following items:
Is the hardware support compiled into the kernel or
available as a module to the kernel? If it is a module,
is it configured properly in modprobe.conf
and has it been loaded?
You should use lsmod as the
root
user to see if
it's loaded. Check the sys.log
file or run modprobe <driver>
to review any error message. If it loads properly, you
may need to add the modprobe command to
your boot scripts.
Are your permissions properly set, especially for
devices? LFS uses groups to make these settings easier,
but it also adds the step of adding users to groups to
allow access. A simple usermod -G audio <user>
may be all that's necessary for that user to have
access to the sound system. Any question that starts
out with “It works as root, but not as
...” requires a thorough review of
permissions prior to asking.
BLFS liberally uses /opt/
.
The main objection to this centers around the need to
expand your environment variables for each package
placed there (e.g., PATH=$PATH:/opt/kde/bin). In most
cases, the package instructions will walk you through
the changes, but some will not. The section called
“Going Beyond
BLFS” is available to help you
check.
<package>
Apart from a brief explanation of the problem you're having, the essential things to include in your request are:
the version of the book you are using (being 10.0),
the package or section giving you problems,
the exact error message or symptom you are receiving,
whether you have deviated from the book or LFS at all,
if you are installing a BLFS package on a non-LFS system.
(Note that saying that you've deviated from the book doesn't mean that we won't help you. It'll just help us to see other possible causes of your problem.)
Expect guidance instead of specific instructions. If you are instructed to read something, please do so. It generally implies that the answer was way too obvious and that the question would not have been asked if a little research was done prior to asking. The volunteers in the mailing list prefer not to be used as an alternative to doing reasonable research on your end. In addition, the quality of your experience with BLFS is also greatly enhanced by this research, and the quality of volunteers is enhanced because they don't feel that their time has been abused, so they are far more likely to participate.
An excellent article on asking for help on the Internet in general has been written by Eric S. Raymond. It is available online at http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html. Read and follow the hints in that document and you are much more likely to get a response to start with and also to get the help you actually need.
Last updated on 2009-09-24 22:43:37 -0700
Many people have contributed both directly and indirectly to BLFS. This page lists all of those we can think of. We may well have left people out and if you feel this is the case, drop us a line. Many thanks to all of the LFS community for their assistance with this project.
Bruce Dubbs
Pierre Labastie
DJ Lucas
Ken Moffat
Douglas Reno
The list of contributors is far too large to provide detailed information about the contributions for each contributor. Over the years, the following individuals have provided significant inputs to the book:
Timothy Bauscher
Daniel Bauman
Jeff Bauman
Andy Benton
Wayne Blaszczyk
Paul Campbell
Nathan Coulson
Jeroen Coumans
Guy Dalziel
Robert Daniels
Richard Downing
Manuel Canales Esparcia
Jim Gifford
Manfred Glombowski
Ag Hatzimanikas
Mark Hymers
James Iwanek
David Jensen
Jeremy Jones
Seth Klein
Alex Kloss
Eric Konopka
Larry Lawrence
Chris Lynn
Andrew McMurry
Randy McMurchy
Denis Mugnier
Billy O'Connor
Fernando de Oliveira
Alexander Patrakov
Olivier Peres
Andreas Pedersen
Henning Rohde
Matt Rogers
James Robertson
Henning Rohde
Chris Staub
Jesse Tie-Ten-Quee
Ragnar Thomsen
Thomas Trepl
Tushar Teredesai
Jeremy Utley
Zack Winkles
Christian Wurst
Igor Živković
Fernando Arbeiza
Miguel Bazdresch
Gerard Beekmans
Oliver Brakmann
Jeremy Byron
Ian Chilton
David Ciecierski
Jim Harris
Lee Harris
Marc Heerdink
Steffen Knollmann
Eric Konopka
Scot McPherson
Ted Riley
Last updated on 2018-09-01 14:51:57 -0700
Please direct your emails to one of the BLFS mailing lists. See Mailing lists for more information on the available mailing lists.
Last updated on 2012-02-05 21:15:51 -0800
This chapter is used to explain some of the policies used throughout the book, to introduce important concepts and to explain some issues you may see with some of the included packages.
Those people who have built an LFS system may be aware of the general principles of downloading and unpacking software. Some of that information is repeated here for those new to building their own software.
Each set of installation instructions contains a URL from which you can download the package. The patches; however, are stored on the LFS servers and are available via HTTP. These are referenced as needed in the installation instructions.
While you can keep the source files anywhere you like, we assume that you have unpacked the package and changed into the directory created by the unpacking process (the 'build' directory). We also assume you have uncompressed any required patches and they are in the directory immediately above the 'build' directory.
We can not emphasize strongly enough that you should start from
a clean source tree each
time. This means that if you have had an error during
configuration or compilation, it's usually best to delete the
source tree and re-unpack it before trying again. This obviously
doesn't apply if you're an advanced user used to hacking
Makefile
s and C code, but if in
doubt, start from a clean tree.
The golden rule of Unix System Administration is to use your
superpowers only when necessary. Hence, BLFS recommends that
you build software as an unprivileged user and only become
the root
user when installing
the software. This philosophy is followed in all the packages
in this book. Unless otherwise specified, all instructions
should be executed as an unprivileged user. The book will
advise you on instructions that need root
privileges.
If a file is in .tar
format and
compressed, it is unpacked by running one of the following
commands:
tar -xvf filename.tar.gz tar -xvf filename.tgz tar -xvf filename.tar.Z tar -xvf filename.tar.bz2
You may omit using the v
parameter in the commands shown above and below if you wish
to suppress the verbose listing of all the files in the
archive as they are extracted. This can help speed up the
extraction as well as make any errors produced during the
extraction more obvious to you.
You can also use a slightly different method:
bzcat filename.tar.bz2 | tar -xv
Finally, you sometimes need to be able to unpack patches
which are generally not in .tar
format. The best way to do this is to copy the patch file to
the parent of the 'build' directory and then run one of the
following commands depending on whether the file is a
.gz
or .bz2
file:
gunzip -v patchname.gz bunzip2 -v patchname.bz2
Generally, to verify that the downloaded file is genuine and
complete, many package maintainers also distribute md5sums of
the files. To verify the md5sum of the downloaded files,
download both the file and the corresponding md5sum file to
the same directory (preferably from different on-line
locations), and (assuming file.md5sum
is the md5sum file downloaded)
run the following command:
md5sum -c file.md5sum
If there are any errors, they will be reported. Note that the
BLFS book includes md5sums for all the source files also. To
use the BLFS supplied md5sums, you can create a file.md5sum
(place the md5sum data and the
exact name of the downloaded file on the same line of a file,
separated by white space) and run the command shown above.
Alternately, simply run the command shown below and compare
the output to the md5sum data shown in the BLFS book.
md5sum <name_of_downloaded_file>
For larger packages, it is convenient to create log files
instead of staring at the screen hoping to catch a particular
error or warning. Log files are also useful for debugging and
keeping records. The following command allows you to create
an installation log. Replace <command>
with the
command you intend to execute.
( <command>
2>&1 | tee compile.log && exit $PIPESTATUS )
2>&1
redirects error
messages to the same location as standard output. The
tee command
allows viewing of the output while logging the results to a
file. The parentheses around the command run the entire
command in a subshell and finally the exit $PIPESTATUS command
ensures the result of the <command>
is returned
as the result and not the result of the tee command.
For many modern systems with multiple processors (or cores) the compilation time for a package can be reduced by performing a "parallel make" by either setting an environment variable or telling the make program how many processors are available. For instance, a Core2Duo can support two simultaneous processes with:
export MAKEFLAGS='-j2'
or just building with:
make -j2
Generally the number of processes should not exceed the
number of cores supported by the CPU. To list the processors
on your system, issue: grep
processor /proc/cpuinfo
.
In some cases, using multiple processors may result in a 'race' condition where the success of the build depends on the order of the commands run by the make program. For instance, if an executable needs File A and File B, attempting to link the program before one of the dependent components is available will result in a failure. This condition usually arises because the upstream developer has not properly designated all the prerequisites needed to accomplish a step in the Makefile.
If this occurs, the best way to proceed is to drop back to a single processor build. Adding '-j1' to a make command will override the similar setting in the MAKEFLAGS environment variable.
When running the package tests or the install portion of the package build process, we do not recommend using an option greater than '-j1' unless specified otherwise. The installation procedures or checks have not been validated using parallel procedures and may fail with issues that are difficult to debug.
There are times when automating the building of a package can
come in handy. Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to
automate building, and everyone goes about it in their own
way. Creating Makefile
s,
Bash scripts, Perl scripts or simply a list of
commands used to cut and paste are just some of the methods
you can use to automate building BLFS packages. Detailing how
and providing examples of the many ways you can automate the
building of packages is beyond the scope of this section.
This section will expose you to using file redirection and
the yes command
to help provide ideas on how to automate your builds.
You will find times throughout your BLFS journey when you will come across a package that has a command prompting you for information. This information might be configuration details, a directory path, or a response to a license agreement. This can present a challenge to automate the building of that package. Occasionally, you will be prompted for different information in a series of questions. One method to automate this type of scenario requires putting the desired responses in a file and using redirection so that the program uses the data in the file as the answers to the questions.
Building the CUPS package is a good example of how redirecting a file as input to prompts can help you automate the build. If you run the test suite, you are asked to respond to a series of questions regarding the type of test to run and if you have any auxiliary programs the test can use. You can create a file with your responses, one response per line, and use a command similar to the one shown below to automate running the test suite:
make check < ../cups-1.1.23-testsuite_parms
This effectively makes the test suite use the responses in the file as the input to the questions. Occasionally you may end up doing a bit of trial and error determining the exact format of your input file for some things, but once figured out and documented you can use this to automate building the package.
Sometimes you will only need to provide one response, or provide the same response to many prompts. For these instances, the yes command works really well. The yes command can be used to provide a response (the same one) to one or more instances of questions. It can be used to simulate pressing just the Enter key, entering the Y key or entering a string of text. Perhaps the easiest way to show its use is in an example.
First, create a short Bash script by entering the following commands:
cat > blfs-yes-test1 << "EOF"
#!/bin/bash
echo -n -e "\n\nPlease type something (or nothing) and press Enter ---> "
read A_STRING
if test "$A_STRING" = ""; then A_STRING="Just the Enter key was pressed"
else A_STRING="You entered '$A_STRING'"
fi
echo -e "\n\n$A_STRING\n\n"
EOF
chmod 755 blfs-yes-test1
Now run the script by issuing ./blfs-yes-test1 from the command line. It will wait for a response, which can be anything (or nothing) followed by the Enter key. After entering something, the result will be echoed to the screen. Now use the yes command to automate the entering of a response:
yes | ./blfs-yes-test1
Notice that piping yes by itself to the script results in y being passed to the script. Now try it with a string of text:
yes 'This is some text' | ./blfs-yes-test1
The exact string was used as the response to the script. Finally, try it using an empty (null) string:
yes '' | ./blfs-yes-test1
Notice this results in passing just the press of the Enter key to the script. This is useful for times when the default answer to the prompt is sufficient. This syntax is used in the Net-tools instructions to accept all the defaults to the many prompts during the configuration step. You may now remove the test script, if desired.
In order to automate the building of some packages, especially those that require you to read a license agreement one page at a time, requires using a method that avoids having to press a key to display each page. Redirecting the output to a file can be used in these instances to assist with the automation. The previous section on this page touched on creating log files of the build output. The redirection method shown there used the tee command to redirect output to a file while also displaying the output to the screen. Here, the output will only be sent to a file.
Again, the easiest way to demonstrate the technique is to show an example. First, issue the command:
ls -l /usr/bin | more
Of course, you'll be required to view the output one page at
a time because the more filter was used. Now
try the same command, but this time redirect the output to a
file. The special file /dev/null
can be used instead of the
filename shown, but you will have no log file to examine:
ls -l /usr/bin | more > redirect_test.log 2>&1
Notice that this time the command immediately returned to the shell prompt without having to page through the output. You may now remove the log file.
The last example will use the yes command in combination with output redirection to bypass having to page through the output and then provide a y to a prompt. This technique could be used in instances when otherwise you would have to page through the output of a file (such as a license agreement) and then answer the question of “do you accept the above?”. For this example, another short Bash script is required:
cat > blfs-yes-test2 << "EOF"
#!/bin/bash
ls -l /usr/bin | more
echo -n -e "\n\nDid you enjoy reading this? (y,n) "
read A_STRING
if test "$A_STRING" = "y"; then A_STRING="You entered the 'y' key"
else A_STRING="You did NOT enter the 'y' key"
fi
echo -e "\n\n$A_STRING\n\n"
EOF
chmod 755 blfs-yes-test2
This script can be used to simulate a program that requires you to read a license agreement, then respond appropriately to accept the agreement before the program will install anything. First, run the script without any automation techniques by issuing ./blfs-yes-test2.
Now issue the following command which uses two automation techniques, making it suitable for use in an automated build script:
yes | ./blfs-yes-test2 > blfs-yes-test2.log 2>&1
If desired, issue tail blfs-yes-test2.log to see the end of the paged output, and confirmation that y was passed through to the script. Once satisfied that it works as it should, you may remove the script and log file.
Finally, keep in mind that there are many ways to automate and/or script the build commands. There is not a single “correct” way to do it. Your imagination is the only limit.
For each package described, BLFS lists the known dependencies. These are listed under several headings, whose meaning is as follows:
Required means that the target package cannot be correctly built without the dependency having first been installed.
Recommended means that BLFS strongly suggests this package is installed first for a clean and trouble-free build, that won't have issues either during the build process, or at run-time. The instructions in the book assume these packages are installed. Some changes or workarounds may be required if these packages are not installed.
Optional means that this package might be installed for added functionality. Often BLFS will describe the dependency to explain the added functionality that will result.
On occasion you may run into a situation in the book when a package will not build or work properly. Though the Editors attempt to ensure that every package in the book builds and works properly, sometimes a package has been overlooked or was not tested with this particular version of BLFS.
If you discover that a package will not build or work properly, you should see if there is a more current version of the package. Typically this means you go to the maintainer's web site and download the most current tarball and attempt to build the package. If you cannot determine the maintainer's web site by looking at the download URLs, use Google and query the package's name. For example, in the Google search bar type: 'package_name download' (omit the quotes) or something similar. Sometimes typing: 'package_name home page' will result in you finding the maintainer's web site.
In LFS, stripping of debugging symbols was discussed a couple of times. When building BLFS packages, there are generally no special instructions that discuss stripping again. It is probably not a good idea to strip an executable or a library while it is in use, so exiting any windowing environment is a good idea. Then you can do:
find /{,usr/}{bin,lib,sbin} \ -type f \( -name \*.so* -a ! -name \*dbg \) \ -exec strip --strip-unneeded {} \;
If you install programs in other directories such as
/opt
or /usr/local
, you may want to strip the files
there too.
For more information on stripping, see http://www.technovelty.org/linux/stripping-shared-libraries.html.
There are now three different build systems in common use for converting C or C++ source code into compiled programs or libraries and their details (particularly, finding out about available options and their default values) differ. It may be easiest to understand the issues caused by some choices (typically slow execution or unexpected use of, or omission of, optimizatons) by starting with the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS environment variables. There are also some programs which use rust.
Most LFS and BLFS builders are probably aware of the basics of CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS for altering how a program is compiled. Typically, some form of optimization is used by upstream developers (-O2 or -O3), sometimes with the creation of debug symbols (-g), as defaults.
If there are contradictory flags (e.g. multiple different -O values), the last value will be used. Sometimes this means that flags specified in environment variables will be picked up before values hardcoded in the Makefile, and therefore ignored. For example, where a user specifies '-O2' and that is followed by '-O3' the build will use '-O3'.
There are various other things which can be passed in CFLAGS or CXXFLAGS, such as forcing compilation for a specific microarchitecture (e.g. -march=amdfam10, -march=native) or specifying a specific standard for C or C++ (-std=c++17 for example). But one thing which has now come to light is that programmers might include debug assertions in their code, expecting them to be disabled in releases by using -DNDEBUG. Specifically, if Mesa-20.1.5 is built with these assertions enabled, some activities such as loading levels of games can take extremely long times, even on high-class video cards.
This combination is often described as 'CMMI' (configure, make, make install) and is used here to also cover the few packages which have a configure script that is not generated by autotools.
Sometimes running ./configure --help will produce useful options about switches which might be used. At other times, after looking at the output from configure you may need to look at the details of the script to find out what it was actually searching for.
Many configure scripts will pick up any CFLAGS or CXXFLAGS from the environment, but CMMI packages vary about how these will be mixed with any flags which would otherwise be used (variously: ignored, used to replace the programmer's suggestion, used before the programmer's suggestion, or used after the programmer's suggestion).
In most CMMI packages, running 'make' will list each command and run it, interspersed with any warnings. But some packages try to be 'silent' and only show which file they are compiling or linking instead of showing the command line. If you need to inspect the command, either because of an error, or just to see what options and flags are being used, adding 'V=1' to the make invocation may help.
CMake works in a very different way, and it has two backends which can be used on BLFS: 'make' and 'ninja'. The default backend is make, but ninja can be faster on large packages with multiple processors. To use ninja, specify '-G Ninja' in the cmake command. However, there are some packages which create fatal errors in their ninja files but build successfully using the default of Unix Makefiles.
The hardest part of using CMake is knowing what options you might wish to specify. The only way to get a list of what the package knows about is to run cmake -LAH and look at the output for that default configuration.
Perhaps the most-important thing about CMake is that it has a variety of CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE values, and these affect the flags. The default is that this is not set and no flags are generated. Any CFLAGS or CXXFLAGS in the environment will be used. If the programmer has coded any debug assertions, those will be enabled unless -DNDEBUG is used. The following CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE values will generate the flags shown, and these will come after any flags in the environment and therefore take precedence.
Debug : '-g'
Release : '-O3 -DNDEBUG'
RelWithDebInfo : '-O2 -g -DNDEBUG'
MinSizeRel : '-Os -DNDEBUG'
CMake tries to produce quiet builds. To see the details of the commands which are being run, use 'make VERBOSE=1' or 'ninja -v'.
Meson has some similarities to CMake, but many differences.
To get details of the defines that you may wish to change you
can look at meson_options.txt
which is usually in the top-level directory.
If you have already configured the package by running meson and now wish to change one or more settings, you can either remove the build directory, recreate it, and use the altered options, or within the build directory run meson configure, e.g. to set an option:
meson configure -D<some_option>=true
If you do that, the file meson-private/cmd_line.txt
will show the
last commands which
were used.
Meson provides the following buildtype values, and the flags they enable come after any flags supplied in the environment and therefore take precedence.
plain : no added flags. This is for distributors to supply their own CLFAGS, CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS. There is no obvious reason to use this in BLFS.
debug : '-g'
debugoptimized : '-O2 -g' - this is the default if nothing is specified, it leaves assertions enabled.
release : '-O3 -DNDEBUG' (but occasionally a package will force -O2 here)
Although the 'release' buildtype is described as enabling -DNDEBUG, and all CMake Release builds pass that, it has so far only been observed (in verbose builds) for Mesa-20.1.5. That suggests that it might only be used when there are debug assertions present.
The -DNDEBUG flag can also be provided by passing -Db_ndebug=true.
To see the details of the commands which are being run in a package using meson, use 'ninja -v'.
Most released rustc programs are provided as crates (source
tarballs) which will query a server to check current versions
of dependencies and then download them as necessary. These
packages are built using cargo
--release. In theory, you can manipulate the
RUSTFLAGS to change the optimize-level (default is 3, like
-O3, e.g. -Copt-level=3
) or to
force it to build for the machine it is being compiled on,
using -Ctarget-cpu=native
but in
practice this seems to make no significant difference.
If you find an interesting rustc program which is only
provided as unpackaged source, you should at least specify
RUSTFLAGS=-Copt-level=2
otherwise it will do an unoptimized compile with debug info
and run much slower.
The rust developers seem to assume that everyone will compile
on a machine dedicated to producing builds, so by default all
CPUs are used. This can often be worked around, either by
exporting CARGO_BUILD_JOBS=<N> or passing --jobs
<N> to cargo. For compiling rustc itself, specifying
--jobs <N> on invocations of x.py (together with the
CARGO_BUILD_JOBS
environment
variable, which looks like a "belt and braces" approach but
seems to be necessary) mostly works. The exception is running
the tests when building rustc, some of them will nevertheless
use all online CPUs, at least as of rustc-1.42.0.
Many people will prefer to optimize compiles as they see fit, by providing CFLAGS or CXXFLAGS. For an introduction to the options available with gcc and g++ see https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html and https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Instrumentation-Options.html and info gcc.
Some packages default to '-O2 -g', others to '-O3 -g', and if CFLAGS or CXXFLAGS are supplied they might be added to the package's defaults, replace the package's defaults, or even be ignored. There are details on some desktop packages which were mostly current in April 2019 at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~ken/tuning/ - in particular, README.txt, tuning-1-packages-and-notes.txt, and tuning-notes-2B.txt. The particular thing to remember is that if you want to try some of the more interesting flags you may need to force verbose builds to confirm what is being used.
Clearly, if you are optimizing your own program you can spend time to profile it and perhaps recode some of it if it is too slow. But for building a whole system that approach is impractical. In general, -O3 usually produces faster programs than -O2. Specifying -march=native is also beneficial, but means that you cannot move the binaries to an incompatible machine - this can also apply to newer machines, not just to older machines. For example programs compiled for 'amdfam10' run on old Phenoms, Kaveris, and Ryzens : but programs compiled for a Kaveri will not run on a Ryzen because certain op-codes are not present. Similarly, if you build for a Haswell not everything will run on a SandyBridge.
There are also various other options which some people claim are beneficial. At worst, you get to recompile and test, and then discover that in your usage the options do not provide a benefit.
If building Perl or Python modules, or Qt packages which use qmake, in general the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS used are those which were used by those 'parent' packages.
Even on desktop systems, there are still a lot of exploitable vulnerabilities. For many of these, the attack comes via javascript in a browser. Often, a series of vulnerabilities are used to gain access to data (or sometimes to pwn, i.e. own, the machine and install rootkits). Most commercial distros will apply various hardening measures.
For hardening options which are reasonably cheap, there is some discussion in the 'tuning' link above (occasionally, one or more of these options might be inappropriate for a package). These options are -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2, -fstack-protector=strong, and (for C++) -D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS. On modern machines these should only have a little impact on how fast things run, and often they will not be noticeable.
In the past, there was Hardened LFS where gcc (a much older version) was forced to use hardening (with options to turn some of it off on a per-package basis. What is being covered here is different - first you have to make sure that the package is indeed using your added flags and not over-riding them.
The main distros use much more, such as RELRO (Relocation Read Only) and perhaps -fstack-clash-protection. You may also encounter the so-called 'userspace retpoline' (-mindirect-branch=thunk etc.) which is the equivalent of the spectre mitigations applied to the linux kernel in late 2018). The kernel mitigations caused a lot of complaints about lost performance, if you have a production server you might wish to consider testing that, along with the other available options, to see if performance is still sufficient.
Whilst gcc has many hardening options, clang/LLVM's strengths lie elsewhere. Some options which gcc provides are said to be less effective in clang/LLVM, others are not available.
Last updated on 2020-06-30 10:45:38 -0700
Should I install XXX in /usr
or /usr/local
?
This is a question without an obvious answer for an LFS based system.
In traditional Unix systems, /usr
usually contains files that come with the system distribution,
and the /usr/local
tree is free
for the local administrator to manage. The only really hard and
fast rule is that Unix distributions should not touch
/usr/local
, except perhaps to
create the basic directories within it.
With Linux distributions like Red Hat, Debian, etc., a possible
rule is that /usr
is managed by
the distribution's package system and /usr/local
is not. This way the package
manager's database knows about every file within /usr
.
LFS users build their own system and so deciding where the
system ends and local files begin is not straightforward. So
the choice should be made in order to make things easier to
administer. There are several reasons for dividing files
between /usr
and /usr/local
.
On a network of several machines all running LFS, or
mixed LFS and other Linux distributions, /usr/local
could be used to hold
packages that are common between all the computers in the
network. It can be NFS mounted or mirrored from a single
server. Here local indicates local to the site.
On a network of several computers all running an
identical LFS system, /usr/local
could hold packages that are
different between the machines. In this case local refers
to the individual computers.
Even on a single computer, /usr/local
can be useful if you have
several distributions installed simultaneously, and want
a place to put packages that will be the same on all of
them.
Or you might regularly rebuild your LFS, but want a place to put files that you don't want to rebuild each time. This way you can wipe the LFS file system and start from a clean partition every time without losing everything.
Some people ask why not use your own directory tree, e.g.,
/usr/site
, rather than
/usr/local
?
There is nothing stopping you, many sites do make their own
trees, however it makes installing new software more difficult.
Automatic installers often look for dependencies in
/usr
and /usr/local
, and if the file it is looking for
is in /usr/site
instead, the
installer will probably fail unless you specifically tell it
where to look.
What is the BLFS position on this?
All of the BLFS instructions install programs in /usr
with optional instructions to install
into /opt
for some specific
packages.
Last updated on 2007-04-04 12:42:53 -0700
As you follow the various sections in the book, you will observe that the book occasionally includes patches that are required for a successful and secure installation of the packages. The general policy of the book is to include patches that fall in one of the following criteria:
Fixes a compilation problem.
Fixes a security problem.
Fixes a broken functionality.
In short, the book only includes patches that are either required or recommended. There is a Patches subproject which hosts various patches (including the patches referenced in the books) to enable you to configure your LFS the way you like it.
Last updated on 2007-04-04 12:42:53 -0700
The BLFS Bootscripts package contains the init scripts that are used throughout the book. It is assumed that you will be using the BLFS Bootscripts package in conjunction with a compatible LFS-Bootscripts package. Refer to ../../../../lfs/view/10.0/chapter09/bootscripts.html for more information on the LFS-Bootscripts package.
Package Information
The BLFS Bootscripts package will be used throughout the BLFS
book for startup scripts. Unlike LFS, each init script has a
separate install target in the BLFS Bootscripts package. It is
recommended you keep the package source directory around until
completion of your BLFS system. When a script is requested from
BLFS Bootscripts, simply change to the directory and as the
root
user, execute the given
make install-<init-script>
command. This command installs the init script to its proper
location (along with any auxiliary configuration scripts) and
also creates the appropriate symlinks to start and stop the
service at the appropriate run-level.
You should review each bootscript before installation to ascertain that it satisfies your need. Also verify that the start and stop symlinks it creates match your preferences.
From time to time the bootscripts are updated to accommodate new packages or to make minor corrections. All versions of the bootscripts are located at http://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/BLFS/blfs-bootscripts/.
Last updated on 2020-08-21 05:19:40 -0700
In LFS we installed a package, libtool, that is used by many packages to build on a variety of Unix platforms. This includes platforms such as AIX, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, and Cygwin as well as Linux. The origins of this tool are quite dated. It was intended to manage libraries on systems with less advanced capabilities than a modern Linux system.
On a Linux system, libtool specific files are generally unneeded. Normally libraries are specified in the build process during the link phase. Since a linux system uses the Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) for executables and libraries, information needed to complete the task is embedded in the files. At run time the program loader can query the appropriate files and properly load and execute the program.
The problem is that libtool usually creates one or more text files for package libraries called libtool archives. These small files have a ".la" extention and contain information that is similar to that embedded in the libraries. When building a package that uses libtool, the process automatically looks for these files. If a package is updated and no longer uses the .la file, then the build process can break.
The solution is to remove the .la files. However there is a catch. Some packages, such as ImageMagick-7.0.10-27, use a libtool function, lt_dlopen, to load libraries as needed during execution and resolve their dependencies at run time. In this case, the .la files should remain.
The script below, removes all unneeded .la files and saves them in a directory, /var/local/la-files by default, not in the normal library path. It also searches all pkg-config files (.pc) for embedded references to .la files and fixes them to be conventional library references needed when an application or library is built. It can be run as needed to clean up the directories that may be causing problems.
cat > /usr/sbin/remove-la-files.sh << "EOF"
#!/bin/bash
# /usr/sbin/remove-la-files.sh
# Written for Beyond Linux From Scratch
# by Bruce Dubbs <[email protected]>
# Make sure we are running with root privs
if test "${EUID}" -ne 0; then
echo "Error: $(basename ${0}) must be run as the root user! Exiting..."
exit 1
fi
# Make sure PKG_CONFIG_PATH is set if discarded by sudo
source /etc/profile
OLD_LA_DIR=/var/local/la-files
mkdir -p $OLD_LA_DIR
# Only search directories in /opt, but not symlinks to directories
OPTDIRS=$(find /opt -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d)
# Move any found .la files to a directory out of the way
find /usr/lib $OPTDIRS -name "*.la" ! -path "/usr/lib/ImageMagick*" \
-exec mv -fv {} $OLD_LA_DIR \;
###############
# Fix any .pc files that may have .la references
STD_PC_PATH='/usr/lib/pkgconfig
/usr/share/pkgconfig
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
/usr/local/share/pkgconfig'
# For each directory that can have .pc files
for d in $(echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH | tr : ' ') $STD_PC_PATH; do
# For each pc file
for pc in $d/*.pc ; do
if [ $pc == "$d/*.pc" ]; then continue; fi
# Check each word in a line with a .la reference
for word in $(grep '\.la' $pc); do
if $(echo $word | grep -q '.la$' ); then
mkdir -p $d/la-backup
cp -fv $pc $d/la-backup
basename=$(basename $word )
libref=$(echo $basename|sed -e 's/^lib/-l/' -e 's/\.la$//')
# Fix the .pc file
sed -i "s:$word:$libref:" $pc
fi
done
done
done
EOF
chmod +x /usr/sbin/remove-la-files.sh
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/la-files
Last updated on 2017-12-23 07:56:03 -0800
The original libraries were simply an archive of routines from which the required routines were extracted and linked into the executable program. These are described as static libraries (libfoo.a). On some old operating systems they are the only type available.
On almost all Linux platforms there are also shared libraries (libfoo.so) - one copy of the library is loaded into virtual memory, and shared by all the programs which call any of its functions. This is space efficient.
In the past, essential programs such as a shell were often
linked statically so that some form of minimal recovery
system would exist even if shared libraries, such as libc.so,
became damaged (e.g. moved to lost+found
after fsck following an unclean
shutdown). Nowadays, most people use an alternative system
install or a Live CD if they have to recover. Journaling
filesystems also reduce the likelihood of this sort of
problem.
Developers, at least while they are developing, often prefer to use static versions of the libraries which their code links to.
Within the book, there are various places where configure switches such as --disable-static are employed, and other places where the possibility of using system versions of libraries instead of the versions included within another package is discussed. The main reason for this is to simplify updates of libraries.
If a package is linked to a dynamic library, updating to a newer library version is automatic once the newer library is installed and the program is (re)started (provided the library major version is unchanged, e.g. going from libfoo.so.2.0 to libfoo.so.2.1. Going to libfoo.so.3 will require recompilation - ldd can be used to find which programs use the old version). If a program is linked to a static library, the program always has to be recompiled. If you know which programs are linked to a particular static library, this is merely an annoyance. But usually you will not know which programs to recompile.
Most libraries are shared, but if you do something unusual,
such as moving a shared library to /lib
accidentally breaking the .so
symlink in /usr/lib
while keeping the static library
in /lib
, the static library
will be silently linked into the programs which need it.
One way to identify when a static library is used, is to deal
with it at the end of the installation of every package.
Write a script to find all the static libraries in
/usr/lib
or wherever you are
installing to, and either move them to another directory so
that they are no longer found by the linker, or rename them
so that libfoo.a becomes e.g. libfoo.a.hidden. The static
library can then be temporarily restored if it is ever
needed, and the package needing it can be identified. You may
choose to exclude some of the static libraries from glibc if
you do this (libc_nonshared.a, libg.a,
libieee.a, libm.a, libpthread_nonshared.a, librpcsvc.a,
libsupc++.a
) to simplify compilation.
If you use this approach, you may discover that more packages than you were expecting use a static library. That was the case with nettle-2.4 in its default static-only configuration: It was required by GnuTLS-3.0.19, but also linked into package(s) which used GnuTLS, such as glib-networking-2.32.3.
Many packages put some of their common functions into a static library which is only used by the programs within the package and, crucially, the library is not installed as a standalone library. These internal libraries are not a problem - if the package has to be rebuilt to fix a bug or vulnerability, nothing else is linked to them.
When BLFS mentions system libraries, it means shared versions of libraries. Some packages such as Firefox-78.2.0 and ghostscript-9.52 include many other libraries. When they link to them, they link statically so this also makes the programs bigger. The version they ship is often older than the version used in the system, so it may contain bugs - sometimes developers go to the trouble of fixing bugs in their included libraries, other times they do not.
Sometimes, deciding to use system libraries is an easy decision. Other times it may require you to alter the system version (e.g. for libpng-1.6.37 if used for Firefox-78.2.0). Occasionally, a package ships an old library and can no longer link to the current version, but can link to an older version. In this case, BLFS will usually just use the shipped version. Sometimes the included library is no longer developed separately, or its upstream is now the same as the package's upstream and you have no other packages which will use it. In those cases, you might decide to use the included static library even if you usually prefer to use system libraries.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/libraries
Last updated on 2015-09-20 15:38:20 -0700
This page contains information about locale related problems and issues. In the following paragraphs you'll find a generic overview of things that can come up when configuring your system for various locales. Many (but not all) existing locale related problems can be classified and fall under one of the headings below. The severity ratings below use the following criteria:
Critical: The program doesn't perform its main function. The fix would be very intrusive, it's better to search for a replacement.
High: Part of the functionality that the program provides is not usable. If that functionality is required, it's better to search for a replacement.
Low: The program works in all typical use cases, but lacks some functionality normally provided by its equivalents.
If there is a known workaround for a specific package, it will appear on that package's page. For the most recent information about locale related issues for individual packages, check the User Notes in the BLFS Wiki.
Severity: Critical
Some programs require the user to specify the character
encoding for their input or output data and present only a
limited choice of encodings. This is the case for the
-X
option in Enscript-1.6.6,
the -input-charset
option in
unpatched Cdrtools-3.02a09, and the character
sets offered for display in the menu of Links-2.20.2. If the
required encoding is not in the list, the program usually
becomes completely unusable. For non-interactive programs, it
may be possible to work around this by converting the
document to a supported input character set before submitting
to the program.
A solution to this type of problem is to implement the necessary support for the missing encoding as a patch to the original program or to find a replacement.
Severity: High for non-text documents, low for text documents
Some programs, nano-5.2 or JOE-4.6 for example, assume that documents are always in the encoding implied by the current locale. While this assumption may be valid for the user-created documents, it is not safe for external ones. When this assumption fails, non-ASCII characters are displayed incorrectly, and the document may become unreadable.
If the external document is entirely text based, it can be converted to the current locale encoding using the iconv program.
For documents that are not text-based, this is not possible. In fact, the assumption made in the program may be completely invalid for documents where the Microsoft Windows operating system has set de facto standards. An example of this problem is ID3v1 tags in MP3 files (see the BLFS Wiki ID3v1Coding page for more details). For these cases, the only solution is to find a replacement program that doesn't have the issue (e.g., one that will allow you to specify the assumed document encoding).
Among BLFS packages, this problem applies to nano-5.2, JOE-4.6, and all media players except Audacious-4.0.5.
Another problem in this category is when someone cannot read the documents you've sent them because their operating system is set up to handle character encodings differently. This can happen often when the other person is using Microsoft Windows, which only provides one character encoding for a given country. For example, this causes problems with UTF-8 encoded TeX documents created in Linux. On Windows, most applications will assume that these documents have been created using the default Windows 8-bit encoding.
In extreme cases, Windows encoding compatibility issues may be solved only by running Windows programs under Wine.
Severity: Critical
The POSIX standard mandates that the filename encoding is the
encoding implied by the current LC_CTYPE locale category.
This information is well-hidden on the page which specifies
the behavior of Tar and
Cpio programs. Some programs
get it wrong by default (or simply don't have enough
information to get it right). The result is that they create
filenames which are not subsequently shown correctly by
ls, or they
refuse to accept filenames that ls shows properly. For the
GLib-2.64.4 library, the problem can be
corrected by setting the G_FILENAME_ENCODING
environment variable to
the special "@locale" value. Glib2 based programs that don't respect
that environment variable are buggy.
The Zip-3.0 and UnZip-6.0 have this problem because they hard-code the expected filename encoding. UnZip contains a hard-coded conversion table between the CP850 (DOS) and ISO-8859-1 (UNIX) encodings and uses this table when extracting archives created under DOS or Microsoft Windows. However, this assumption only works for those in the US and not for anyone using a UTF-8 locale. Non-ASCII characters will be mangled in the extracted filenames.
The general rule for avoiding this class of problems is to avoid installing broken programs. If this is impossible, the convmv command-line tool can be used to fix filenames created by these broken programs, or intentionally mangle the existing filenames to meet the broken expectations of such programs.
In other cases, a similar problem is caused by importing filenames from a system using a different locale with a tool that is not locale-aware (e.g., OpenSSH-8.3p1). In order to avoid mangling non-ASCII characters when transferring files to a system with a different locale, any of the following methods can be used:
Transfer anyway, fix the damage with convmv.
On the sending side, create a tar archive with the
--format=posix
switch passed to tar (this will be the
default in a future version of tar).
Mail the files as attachments. Mail clients specify the encoding of attached filenames.
Write the files to a removable disk formatted with a FAT or FAT32 filesystem.
Transfer the files using Samba.
Transfer the files via FTP using RFC2640-aware server (this currently means only wu-ftpd, which has bad security history) and client (e.g., lftp).
The last four methods work because the filenames are automatically converted from the sender's locale to UNICODE and stored or sent in this form. They are then transparently converted from UNICODE to the recipient's locale encoding.
Severity: High or critical
Many programs were written in an older era where multibyte locales were not common. Such programs assume that C "char" data type, which is one byte, can be used to store single characters. Further, they assume that any sequence of characters is a valid string and that every character occupies a single character cell. Such assumptions completely break in UTF-8 locales. The visible manifestation is that the program truncates strings prematurely (i.e., at 80 bytes instead of 80 characters). Terminal-based programs don't place the cursor correctly on the screen, don't react to the "Backspace" key by erasing one character, and leave junk characters around when updating the screen, usually turning the screen into a complete mess.
Fixing this kind of problems is a tedious task from a programmer's point of view, like all other cases of retrofitting new concepts into the old flawed design. In this case, one has to redesign all data structures in order to accommodate to the fact that a complete character may span a variable number of "char"s (or switch to wchar_t and convert as needed). Also, for every call to the "strlen" and similar functions, find out whether a number of bytes, a number of characters, or the width of the string was really meant. Sometimes it is faster to write a program with the same functionality from scratch.
Among BLFS packages, this problem applies to xine-ui-0.99.12 and all the shells.
Severity: Low
LFS expects that manual pages are in the language-specific (usually 8-bit) encoding, as specified on the LFS Man DB page. However, some packages install translated manual pages in UTF-8 encoding (e.g., Shadow, already dealt with), or manual pages in languages not in the table. Not all BLFS packages have been audited for conformance with the requirements put in LFS (the large majority have been checked, and fixes placed in the book for packages known to install non-conforming manual pages). If you find a manual page installed by any of BLFS packages that is obviously in the wrong encoding, please remove or convert it as needed, and report this to BLFS team as a bug.
You can easily check your system for any non-conforming manual pages by copying the following short shell script to some accessible location,
#!/bin/sh
# Begin checkman.sh
# Usage: find /usr/share/man -type f | xargs checkman.sh
for a in "$@"
do
# echo "Checking $a..."
# Pure-ASCII manual page (possibly except comments) is OK
grep -v '.\\"' "$a" | iconv -f US-ASCII -t US-ASCII >/dev/null 2>&1 \
&& continue
# Non-UTF-8 manual page is OK
iconv -f UTF-8 -t UTF-8 "$a" >/dev/null 2>&1 || continue
# Found a UTF-8 manual page, bad.
echo "UTF-8 manual page: $a" >&2
done
# End checkman.sh
and then issuing the following command (modify the command
below if the checkman.sh script is not
in your PATH
environment
variable):
find /usr/share/man -type f | xargs checkman.sh
Note that if you have manual pages installed in any location
other than /usr/share/man
(e.g., /usr/local/share/man
),
you must modify the above command to include this additional
location.
Last updated on 2020-08-21 05:19:40 -0700
The packages that are installed in this book are only the tip of the iceberg. We hope that the experience you gained with the LFS book and the BLFS book will give you the background needed to compile, install and configure packages that are not included in this book.
When you want to install a package to a location other than
/
, or /usr
, you are installing outside the default
environment settings on most machines. The following examples
should assist you in determining how to correct this situation.
The examples cover the complete range of settings that may need
updating, but they are not all needed in every situation.
Expand the PATH
to include
$PREFIX/bin
.
Expand the PATH
for
root
to include
$PREFIX/sbin
.
Add $PREFIX/lib
to
/etc/ld.so.conf
or expand
LD_LIBRARY_PATH
to include it.
Before using the latter option, check out http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_/ldpath.html.
If you modify /etc/ld.so.conf
, remember to update
/etc/ld.so.cache
by
executing ldconfig as the
root
user.
Add $PREFIX/man
to
/etc/man_db.conf
or expand
MANPATH
.
Add $PREFIX/info
to
INFOPATH
.
Add $PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig
to PKG_CONFIG_PATH
. Some
packages are now installing .pc
files in $PREFIX/share/pkgconfig
, so you may
have to include this directory also.
Add $PREFIX/include
to
CPPFLAGS
when compiling
packages that depend on the package you installed.
Add $PREFIX/lib
to
LDFLAGS
when compiling
packages that depend on a library installed by the
package.
If you are in search of a package that is not in the book, the following are different ways you can search for the desired package.
If you know the name of the package, then search Freecode
for it at http://freecode.com/. Also
search Google at http://google.com/. Sometimes a
search for the rpm
at
http://rpmfind.net/ or the
deb
at http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_packages
can also lead to a link to the package.
If you know the name of the executable, but not the package that the executable belongs to, first try a Google search with the name of the executable. If the results are overwhelming, try searching for the given executable in the Debian repository at http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_contents.
Some general hints on handling new packages:
Many of the newer packages follow the ./configure && make && make install process. Help on the options accepted by configure can be obtained via the command ./configure --help.
Most of the packages contain documentation on compiling and installing the package. Some of the documents are excellent, some not so excellent. Check out the homepage of the package for any additional and updated hints for compiling and configuring the package.
If you are having a problem compiling the package, try searching the LFS archives at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/search.html for the error or if that fails, try searching Google. Often, a distribution will have already solved the problem (many of them use development versions of packages, so they see the changes sooner than those of us who normally use stable released versions). But be cautious - all builders tend to carry patches which are no longer necessary, and to have fixes which are only required because of their particular choices in how they build a package. You may have to search deeply to find a fix for the package version you are trying to use, or even to find the package (names are sometimes not what you might expect, e.g. ghostscript often has a prefix or a suffix in its name), but the following notes might help, particularly for those who, like the editors, are trying to build the latest versions and encountering problems:
Arch http://www.archlinux.org/packages/
- enter the package name in the 'Keywords' box,
select the package name, select the 'Source Files'
field, and then select the PKGBUILD
entry to see how they
build this package.
Debian ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool
(use your country's version if there is one) - the
source will be in .tar.gz tarballs (either the
original upstream .orig
source, or else a
dfsg
containing those
parts which comply with debian's free software
guidelines) accompanied by versioned .diff.gz or
.tar.gz additions. These additions often show how
the package is built, and may contain patches. In
the .diff.gz versions, any patches create files in
debian/patches
.
Fedora package source gets reorganized from time to time. At the moment the package source for rpms is at https://src.fedoraproject.org/projects/rpms/%2A and from there you can try putting a package name in the search box. If the package is found you can look at the files (specfile to control the build, various patches) or the commits. If that fails, you can download an srpm (source rpm) and using rpm2cpio (see the Tip at the bottom of the page). For rpms go to https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/ and then choose which repo you wish to look at - development/rawhide is the latest development, or choose releases for what was shipped in a release, updates for updates to a release, or updates/testing for the latest updates which might work or might have problems.
Gentoo - the mirrors for ebuilds and patches seem
to be well-hidden, and they change frequently.
Also, if you have found a mirror, you need to know
which directory the application has been assigned
to. The ebuilds themselves can be found at
http://packages.gentoo.org/
- use the search field. If there are any patches, a
mirror will have them in the files/
directory. Depending on
your browser, or the mirror, you might need to
download the ebuild to be able to read it. Treat
the ebuild as a sort of pseudo-code / shell
combination - look in particular for sed commands and
patches, or hazard a guess at the meanings of the
functions such as dodoc.
openSUSE provide a rolling release, some package versions are in http://download.opensuse.org/source/tumbleweed/repo/oss/src/ but others are in ../update/openSUSE-current/src - the source only seems to be available in source rpms.
Slackware - the official package browser is
currently broken. The site at http://slackbuilds.org/
has current and previous versions in their
unofficial repository with links to homepages,
downloads, and some individual files, particularly
the .SlackBuild
files.
Ubuntu ftp://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/ - see the debian notes above.
If everything else fails, try the blfs-support mailing-list.
If you have found a package that is only available in
.deb
or .rpm
format, there are two small scripts,
rpm2targz and
deb2targz that
are available at http://downloads.linuxfromscratch.org/deb2targz.tar.bz2
and http://downloads.linuxfromscratch.org/rpm2targz.tar.bz2
to convert the archives into a simple tar.gz
format.
You may also find an rpm2cpio script useful. The Perl version in the linux kernel archives at http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0210.2/att-0093/01-rpm2cpio works for most source rpms. The rpm2targz script will use an rpm2cpio script or binary if one is on your path. Note that rpm2cpio will unpack a source rpm in the current directory, giving a tarball, a spec file, and perhaps patches or other files.
Last updated on 2020-02-06 15:43:11 -0800
The intention of LFS is to provide a basic system which you can build upon. There are several things about tidying up the system which many people wonder about once they have done the base install. We hope to cover these issues in this chapter.
Most people coming from non-Unix like backgrounds to Linux find
the concept of text-only configuration files slightly strange. In
Linux, just about all configuration is done via the manipulation
of text files. The majority of these files can be found in the
/etc
hierarchy. There are often
graphical configuration programs available for different
subsystems but most are simply pretty front ends to the process
of editing a text file. The advantage of text-only configuration
is that you can edit parameters using your favorite text editor,
whether that be vim, emacs, or any other editor.
The first task is making a recovery boot device in Creating a Custom Boot Device because it's the most critical need. Hardware issues relevant to firmware and other devices is addressed next. The system is then configured to ease addition of new users, because this can affect the choices you make in the two subsequent topics—The Bash Shell Startup Files and The vimrc Files.
The remaining topics, Customizing your Logon with /etc/issue and Random number generation are then addressed, in that order. They don't have much interaction with the other topics in this chapter.
This section is really about creating a rescue device. As the name rescue implies, the host system has a problem, often lost partition information or corrupted file systems, that prevents it from booting and/or operating normally. For this reason, you must not depend on resources from the host being "rescued". To presume that any given partition or hard drive will be available is a risky presumption.
In a modern system, there are many devices that can be used as a rescue device: floppy, cdrom, usb drive, or even a network card. Which one you use depends on your hardware and your BIOS. In the past, a rescue device was thought to be a floppy disk. Today, many systems do not even have a floppy drive.
Building a complete rescue device is a challenging task. In many ways, it is equivalent to building an entire LFS system. In addition, it would be a repetition of information already available. For these reasons, the procedures for a rescue device image are not presented here.
The software of today's systems has grown large. Linux 2.6 no longer supports booting directly from a floppy. In spite of this, there are solutions available using older versions of Linux. One of the best is Tom's Root/Boot Disk available at http://www.toms.net/rb/. This will provide a minimal Linux system on a single floppy disk and provides the ability to customize the contents of your disk if necessary.
There are several sources that can be used for a rescue CD-ROM. Just about any commercial distribution's installation CD-ROMs or DVDs will work. These include RedHat, Ubuntu, and SuSE. One very popular option is Knoppix.
Also, the LFS Community has developed its own LiveCD available at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/livecd/. This LiveCD, is no longer capable of building an entire LFS/BLFS system, but is still a good rescue CD-ROM. If you download the ISO image, use xorriso to copy the image to a CD-ROM.
The instructions for using GRUB2 to make a custom rescue CD-ROM are also available in LFS Chapter 10.
A USB Pen drive, sometimes called a Thumb drive, is recognized by Linux as a SCSI device. Using one of these devices as a rescue device has the advantage that it is usually large enough to hold more than a minimal boot image. You can save critical data to the drive as well as use it to diagnose and recover a damaged system. Booting such a drive requires BIOS support, but building the system consists of formatting the drive, adding GRUB as well as the Linux kernel and supporting files.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/CreatingaCustomBootDevice
Last updated on 2020-08-21 05:19:40 -0700
An LFS system can be used without a graphical desktop, and unless or until you install X Window System you will have to work in the console. Most, if not all, PCs boot with an 8x16 font - whatever the actual screen size. There are a few things you can do to alter the display on the console. Most of them involve changing the font, but the first alters the commandline used by grub.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/aboutconsolefonts
Modern screens often have a lot more pixels then the screens used in the past. If your screen is 1600 pixels wide, an 8x16 font will give you 200 columns of text - unless your monitor is enormous, the text will be tiny. One of the ways to work around this is to tell grub to use a smaller size, such as 1024x768 or 800x600 or even 640x480. Even if your screen does not have a 4:3 aspect ratio, this should work.
To try this, you can reboot and edit grub's command-line to
insert a 'video=' parameter between the 'root=/dev/sdXn' and
'ro', for example root=/dev/sda2
video=1024x768 ro
based on the example in LFS section
10.4.4 : ../../../../lfs/view/10.0/chapter10/grub.html
.
If you decide that you wish to do this, you can then (as the
root
user) edit /boot/grub/grub.cfg
.
In LFS the kbd package is
used. The fonts it provides are PC Screen Fonts, usually
called PSF, and they were installed into /usr/share/consolefonts
. Where these
include a unicode mapping table, the file suffix is often
changed to .psfu
although
packages such as terminus-font (see below) do not add the
'u'. These fonts are usually compressed with gzip to save
space, but that is not essential.
The initial PC text screens had 8 colours, or 16 colours if the bright versions of the original 8 colours were used. A PSF font can include up to 256 characters (technically, glyphs) while allowing 16 colours, or up to 512 characters (in which case, the bright colours will not be available). Clearly, these console fonts cannot be used to display CJK text - that would need thousands of available glyphs.
Some fonts in kbd can cover more than 512 codepoints ('characters'), with varying degrees of fidelity: unicode contains several whitespace codepoints which can all be mapped to a space, varieties of dashes can be mapped to a minus sign, smart quotes can map to the regular ASCII quotes rather than to whatever is used for "codepoint not present or invalid", and those cyrillic or greek letters which look like latin letters can be mapped onto them, so 'A' can also do duty for cyrillic A and greek Alpha, and 'P' can also do duty for cyrillic ER and greek RHO. Unfortunately, where a font has been created from a BDF file (the method in terminus and debian's console-setup ) such mapping of additional codepoints onto an existing glyph is not always done, although the terminus ter-vXXn fonts do this well.
There are over 120 combinations of font and size in
kbd: often a font is
provided at several character sizes, and sometimes varieties
cover different subsets of unicode. Most are 8 pixels wide,
in heights from 8 to 16 pixels, but there are a few which are
9 pixels wide, some others which are 12x22, and even one
(latarcyrheb-sun32.psfu
) which
has been scaled up to 16x32. Using a bigger font is another
way of making text on a large screen easier to read.
You can test fonts as a normal user. If you have a font which has not been installed, you can load it with :
setfont /path/to/yourfont.ext
For the fonts already installed you only need the name, so
using gr737a-9x16.psfu.gz
as an
example:
setfont gr737a-9x16
To see the glyphs in the font, use:
showconsolefont
If the font looks as if it might be useful, you can then go on to test it more thoroughly.
When you find a font which you wish to use, as the
root
user) edit /etc/sysconfig/console
as described in LFS section 9.6.5 ../../../../lfs/view/10.0/chapter09/usage.html.
.
For fonts not supplied with the kbd package you will need to optionally
compress it / them with gzip and then install it /
them as the root
user.
Although some console fonts are created from BDF files, which is a text format with hex values for the pixels in each row of the character, there are more-modern tools available for editing psf fonts. The psftools package allows you to dump a font to a text representation with a dash for a pixel which is off (black) and a hash for a pixel which is on (white). You can then edit the text file to add more characters, or reshape them, or map extra codepoints onto them, and then create a new psf font with your changes.
The Terminus Font
package provides fixed-width bitmap fonts designed for long
(8 hours and more per day) work with computers. Under
'Character variants' on that page is a list of patches (in
the alt/
directory). If you are
using a graphical browser to look at that page, you can see
what the patches do, e.g. 'll2' makes 'l' more visibly
different from 'i' and '1'.
By default terminus-fonts will try to create several types of font, and it will fail if bdftopcf from Xorg Applications has not been installed. The configure script is only really useful if you go on to install all the fonts (console and X11 bitmap) to the correct directories, as in a distro. To build only the PSF fonts and their dependencies, run:
make psf
This will create more than 240 ter-*.psf fonts. The 'b' suffix indicates bright, 'n' indicates normal. You can then test them to see if any fit your requirements. Unless you are creating a distro, there seems little point in installing them all.
As an example, to install the last of these fonts, you can
gzip it and then as the root
user:
install -v -m644 ter-v32n.psf.gz /usr/share/consolefonts
Last updated on 2020-08-21 05:19:40 -0700
On some recent PCs it can be necessary, or desirable, to load
firmware to make them work at their best. There is a directory,
/lib/firmware
, where the kernel
or kernel drivers look for firmware images.
Currently, most firmware can be found at a git
repository:
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/.
For convenience, the LFS Project has created a mirror, updated
daily, where these firmware files can be accessed via
wget
or a web
browser at http://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/BLFS/linux-firmware/.
To get the firmware, either point a browser to one of the above repositories and then download the item(s) which you need, or install git-2.28.0 and clone that repository.
For some other firmware, particularly for Intel microcode and certain wifi devices, the needed firmware is not available in the above repository. Some of this will be addressed below, but a search of the Internet for needed firmware is sometimes necessary.
Firmware files are conventionally referred to as blobs because you cannot determine what they will do. Note that firmware is distributed under various different licenses which do not permit disassembly or reverse-engineering.
Firmware for PCs falls into four categories:
Updates to the CPU to work around errata, usually referred to as microcode.
Firmware for video controllers. On x86 machines this is required for ATI devices (Radeon and AMDGPU chips) and may be useful for Intel (Skylake and later) and Nvidia (Kepler and later) GPUs.
ATI Radeon and AMGPU devices all require firmware to be able to use KMS (kernel modesetting - the preferred option) as well as for Xorg. For old radeon chips (before the R600), the firmware is still in the kernel source.
Intel integrated GPUs from Skylake onwards can use firmware for GuC (the Graphics microcontroller), and also for the HuC (HEVC/H265 microcontroller which offloads to the GPU) and the DMC (Display Microcontroller) to provide additional low-power states. The GuC and HuC have had a chequered history in the kernel and updated firmware may be disabled by default, depending on your kernel version. Further details may be found at 01.org and Arch linux.
Nvidia GPUs from Kepler onwards require signed firmware, otherwise the nouveau driver is unable to provide hardware acceleration. Nvidia has now released firmware up to Turing (most, maybe all, GTX16xx and RTX20xx GPUs) to linux-firmware, and kernels from linux-5.6 should support it, although Mesa support may require a development version until Mesa-20.2 is released. Note that faster clocks than the default are not enabled by the released firmware.
Firmware updates for wired network ports. Mostly they work even without the updates, but probably they will work better with the updated firmware. For some modern laptops, firmware for both wired ethernet (e.g. rtl_nic) and also for bluetooth devices (e.g. qca) is required before the wired network can be used.
Firmware for other devices, such as wifi. These devices are not required for the PC to boot, but need the firmware before these devices can be used.
Although not needed to load a firmware blob, the following tools may be useful for determining, obtaining, or preparing the needed firmware in order to load it into the system: cpio-2.13, git-2.28.0, pciutils-3.7.0, and Wget-1.20.3
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/aboutfirmware
In general, microcode can be loaded by the BIOS or UEFI, and it might be updated by upgrading to a newer version of those. On linux, you can also load the microcode from the kernel if you are using an AMD family 10h or later processor (first introduced late 2007), or an Intel processor from 1998 and later (Pentium4, Core, etc), if updated microcode has been released. These updates only last until the machine is powered off, so they need to be applied on every boot.
Intel provide updates of their microcode for Haswell and later processors as new vulnerabilities come to light, and have in the past provided updates for processors from SandyBridge onwards, although those are no-longer supported for new fixes. New versions of AMD firmware are rare and usually only apply to a few models, although motherboard manufacturers get extra updates which maybe update microcode along with the changes to support newer CPUs and faster memory.
There are two ways of loading the microcode, described as 'early' and 'late'. Early loading happens before userspace has been started, late loading happens after userspace has started. Not surprisingly, early loading is preferred, (see e.g. an explanatory comment in a kernel commit noted at x86/microcode: Early load microcode on LWN.) Indeed, it is needed to work around one particular erratum in early Intel Haswell processors which had TSX enabled. (See Intel Disables TSX Instructions: Erratum Found in Haswell, Haswell-E/EP, Broadwell-Y .) Without this update glibc can do the wrong thing in uncommon situations.
It is still possible to manually force late loading of
microcode, either for testing or to prevent having to reboot.
You will need to reconfigure your kernel for either method.
The instructions here will create a kernel .config
to suite early loading, before
forcing late loading to see if there is any microcode. If
there is, the instructions then show you how to create an
initrd for early loading.
To confirm what processor(s) you have (if more than one, they will be identical) look in /proc/cpuinfo.
If you are creating an initrd to update firmware for different machines, as a distro would do, go down to 'Early loading of microcode' and cat all the Intel blobs to GenuineIntel.bin or cat all the AMD blobs to AuthenticAMD.bin. This creates a larger initrd - for all Intel machines in the 20200609 update the size is 3.0 MB compared to typically 24 KB for one machine.
The first step is to get the most recent version of the
Intel microcode. This must be done by navigating to
https://github.com/intel/Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-Files/releases/
and downloading the latest file there. As of this writing
the most secure version of the microcode, for those
machines which can boot it, is microcode-20200609. If you
have a Skylake machine, please read the Caution in the
'Early loading of microcode' section below. Extract this
file in the normal way, the microcode is in the
intel-ucode
directory,
containing various blobs with names in the form XX-YY-ZZ.
There are also various other files, and a releasenote.
In the past, intel did not provide any details of which blobs had changed versions, but now the release note details this.
The recent firmware for older processors is provided to deal with vulnerabilities which have now been made public, and for some of these such as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) you might wish to increase the protection by disabling hyperthreading, or alternatively to disable the kernel's default mitigation because of its impact on compile times. Please read the online documentation at https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/hw-vuln/index.html.
The documentation on the latest SRBDS (Special Register Buffer Data Sampling) vulnerabilities/fixes will be documented in kernels 5.4.46, 5.6.18, 5.7.2, 5.8.0 and later.
Now you need to determine your processor's identity to see if there is any microcode for it. Determine the decimal values of the cpu family, model and stepping by running the following command (it will also report the current microcode version):
head -n7 /proc/cpuinfo
Convert the cpu family, model and stepping to pairs of hexadecimal digits. For a Skylake i3 6100 (described as Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-6100 CPU) the relevant values are cpu family 6, model 94, stepping 3 so in this case the required identification is 06-5e-03. A look at the blobs will show that there is one for this CPU (although for older issues it might have already been applied by the BIOS). If there is a blob for your system then test if it will be applied by copying it (replace <XX-YY-ZZ> by the identifier for your CPU) to where the kernel can find it:
mkdir -pv /lib/firmware/intel-ucode cp -v intel-ucode/<XX-YY-ZZ> /lib/firmware/intel-ucode
Now that the Intel microcode has been prepared, use the following options when you configure the kernel to load Intel microcode:
General Setup --->
[y] Initial RAM filesystem and RAM disk (initramfs/initrd) support [CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD]
Processor type and features --->
[y] CPU microcode loading support [CONFIG_MICROCODE]
[y] Intel microcode loading support [CONFIG_MICROCODE_INTEL]
After you have successfully booted the new system, force late loading by using the command:
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode/reload
Then use the following command to see if anything was loaded: (N.B. the dates when microcode was created may be months ahead of when it was released.)
dmesg | grep -e 'microcode' -e 'Linux version' -e 'Command line'
This reformatted example for an old (20191115) verison of the microcode was created by temporarily booting without microcode, to show the current Firmware Bug message, then the late load shows it being updated to revision 0xd6.
[ 0.000000] Linux version 5.4.2 (lfs@leshp) (gcc version 9.2.0 (GCC))
#1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Dec 18 11:52:13 GMT 2019
[ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-5.4.2-sda11 root=/dev/sda11 ro
[ 0.020218] [Firmware Bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata; please update microcode
to version: 0xb2 (or later)
[ 0.153861] MDS: Vulnerable: Clear CPU buffers attempted, no microcode
[ 0.550009] microcode: sig=0x506e3, pf=0x2, revision=0x74
[ 0.550036] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.2.
[ 277.673064] microcode: updated to revision 0xd6, date = 2019-10-03
[ 277.674231] x86/CPU: CPU features have changed after loading microcode, but might not take effect
If the microcode was not updated, there is no new microcode for this system's processor. If it did get updated, you can now proceed to the section called “Early loading of microcode”.
Begin by downloading a container of firmware for your CPU
family from
http://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/BLFS/linux-firmware/amd-ucode/.
The family is always specified in hex. Families 10h to 14h
(16 to 20) are in microcode_amd.bin. Families 15h, 16h and
17h have their own containers. Create the required
directory and put the firmware you downloaded into it as
the root
user:
mkdir -pv /lib/firmware/amd-ucode cp -v microcode_amd* /lib/firmware/amd-ucode
When you configure the kernel, use the following options to load AMD microcode:
General Setup --->
[y] Initial RAM filesystem and RAM disk (initramfs/initrd) support [CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD]
Processor type and features --->
[y] CPU microcode loading support [CONFIG_MICROCODE]
[y] AMD microcode loading support [CONFIG_MICROCODE_AMD]
After you have successfully booted the new system, force late loading by using the command:
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/microcode/reload
Then use the following command to see if anything was loaded:
dmesg | grep -e 'microcode' -e 'Linux version' -e 'Command line'
This historic example from an old Athlon(tm) II X2 shows it has been updated. At that time, all CPUs were still reported in the microcode details on AMD machines (the current position for AMD machines where newer microcode is available is unknown) :
[ 0.000000] Linux version 4.15.3 (ken@testserver) (gcc version 7.3.0 (GCC))
#1 SMP Sun Feb 18 02:08:12 GMT 2018
[ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-4.15.3-sda5 root=/dev/sda5 ro
[ 0.307619] microcode: CPU0: patch_level=0x010000b6
[ 0.307671] microcode: CPU1: patch_level=0x010000b6
[ 0.307743] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.2.
[ 187.928891] microcode: CPU0: new patch_level=0x010000c8
[ 187.928899] microcode: CPU1: new patch_level=0x010000c8
If the microcode was not updated, there is no new microcode for this system's processor. If it did get updated, you can now proceed to the section called “Early loading of microcode”.
If you have established that updated microcode is available for your system, it is time to prepare it for early loading. This requires an additional package, cpio-2.13 and the creation of an initrd which will need to be added to grub.cfg.
It does not matter where you prepare the initrd, and once it is working you can apply the same initrd to later LFS systems or newer kernels on this same machine, at least until any newer microcode is released. Use the following commands:
mkdir -p initrd/kernel/x86/microcode cd initrd
For an AMD machine, use the following command (replace <MYCONTAINER> with the name of the container for your CPU's family):
cp -v /lib/firmware/amd-ucode/<MYCONTAINER> kernel/x86/microcode/AuthenticAMD.bin
Or for an Intel machine copy the appropriate blob using this command:
cp -v /lib/firmware/intel-ucode/<XX-YY-ZZ> kernel/x86/microcode/GenuineIntel.bin
On some Skylake machines with hex Model Number '4e' (78 decimal) the upgrade to microcode version '0xdc' is reported to cause the machine to hang in early boot, and the fix is to revert to version 0xd6 which was first shipped in the 20191115 microcode release.
At least one model '5e' Skylake does boot successfully with version 0xdc, but Intel has now shipped a 20200616 release which is intended for distros which need an initrd that will boot on everyone's machine: it reverts both Skylake variants ('4e' and '5e') to the old 0xd6.
For a Skylake which does not boot with 0xdc, reverting to 0xd6 will make the machine usable, but without the SRBDS mitigations.
Now prepare the initrd:
find . | cpio -o -H newc > /boot/microcode.img
You now need to add a new entry to /boot/grub/grub.cfg and here you should add a new line after the linux line within the stanza. If /boot is a separate mountpoint:
initrd /microcode.img
or this if it is not:
initrd /boot/microcode.img
If you are already booting with an initrd (see the
section called “About initramfs”), you
should run mkinitramfs again after
putting the appropriate blob or container into /lib/firmware
as explained above.
Alternatively, you can have both initrd on the same line,
such as initrd
/microcode.img /other-initrd.img
(adapt
that as above if /boot is not a separate mountpoint).
You can now reboot with the added initrd, and then use the same command to check that the early load worked:
dmesg | grep -e 'microcode' -e 'Linux version' -e 'Command line'
If you updated to address vulnerabilities, you can look at
/sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/
to see what is now reported.
The places and times where early loading happens are very different in AMD and Intel machines. First, an Intel (Haswell) example with early loading:
[ 0.000000] microcode: microcode updated early to revision 0x28, date = 2019-11-12
[ 0.000000] Linux version 5.6.2 (ken@plexi) (gcc version 9.2.0 (GCC)) #2 SMP PREEMPT Tue Apr 7 21:34:32 BST 2020
[ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-5.6.2-sda10 root=/dev/sda10 ro resume=/dev/sdb1
[ 0.371462] microcode: sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x28
[ 0.371491] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.2.
A historic AMD example:
[ 0.000000] Linux version 4.15.3 (ken@testserver) (gcc version 7.3.0 (GCC))
#2 SMP Sun Feb 18 02:32:03 GMT 2018
[ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-4.15.3-sda5 root=/dev/sda5 ro
[ 0.307619] microcode: microcode updated early to new patch_level=0x010000c8
[ 0.307678] microcode: CPU0: patch_level=0x010000c8
[ 0.307723] microcode: CPU1: patch_level=0x010000c8
[ 0.307795] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.2.
These instructions do NOT apply to old radeons before the
R600 family. For those, the firmware is in the kernel's
/lib/firmware/
directory. Nor
do they apply if you intend to avoid a graphical setup such
as Xorg and are content to use the default 80x25 display
rather than a framebuffer.
Early radeon devices only needed a single 2K blob of firmware. Recent devices need several different blobs, and some of them are much bigger. The total size of the radeon firmware directory is over 500K — on a large modern system you can probably spare the space, but it is still redundant to install all the unused files each time you build a system.
A better approach is to install pciutils-3.7.0 and
then use lspci
to identify which
VGA controller is installed.
With that information, check the RadeonFeature page of the Xorg wiki for Decoder ring for engineering vs marketing names to identify the family (you may need to know this for the Xorg driver in BLFS — Southern Islands and Sea Islands use the radeonsi driver) and the specific model.
Now that you know which controller you are using, consult the Radeon page of the Gentoo wiki which has a table listing the required firmware blobs for the various chipsets. Note that Southern Islands and Sea Islands chips use different firmware for kernel 3.17 and later compared to earlier kernels. Identify and download the required blobs then install them:
mkdir -pv /lib/firmware/radeon cp -v <YOUR_BLOBS> /lib/firmware/radeon
There are actually two ways of installing this firmware. BLFS, in the 'Kernel Configuration for additional firmware' section part of the Xorg ATI Driver-19.1.0 section gives an example of compiling the firmware into the kernel - that is slightly faster to load, but uses more kernel memory. Here we will use the alternative method of making the radeon driver a module. In your kernel config set the following:
Device Drivers --->
Graphics support --->
Direct Rendering Manager --->
<*> Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 ... support) [CONFIG_DRM]
<m> ATI Radeon [CONFIG_DRM_RADEON]
Loading several large blobs from /lib/firmware takes a noticeable time, during which the screen will be blank. If you do not enable the penguin framebuffer logo, or change the console size by using a bigger font, that probably does not matter. If desired, you can slightly reduce the time if you follow the alternate method of specifying 'y' for CONFIG_DRM_RADEON covered in BLFS at the link above — you must specify each needed radeon blob if you do that.
Some Nvidia graphics chips need firmware updates to take advantage of all the card's capability. These are generally the GeForce 8, 9, 9300, and 200-900 series chips. For more exact information, see https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/#firmware.
First, the kernel Nvidia driver must be activated:
Device Drivers --->
Graphics support --->
Direct Rendering Manager --->
<*> Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 ... support) [CONFIG_DRM]
<*/m> Nouveau (NVIDIA) cards [CONFIG_DRM_NOUVEAU]
The steps to install the Nvidia firmware are:
wget https://raw.github.com/imirkin/re-vp2/master/extract_firmware.py wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/325.15/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-325.15.run sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-325.15.run --extract-only python extract_firmware.py mkdir -p /lib/firmware/nouveau cp -d nv* vuc-* /lib/firmware/nouveau/
The kernel likes to load firmware for some network drivers,
particularly those from Realtek (the
/lib/linux-firmware/rtl_nic/) directory, but they generally
appear to work without it. Therefore, you can boot the
kernel, check dmesg for messages about this missing firmware,
and if necessary download the firmware and put it in the
specified directory in /lib/firmware
so that it will be found on
subsequent boots. Note that with current kernels this works
whether or not the driver is compiled in or built as a
module, there is no need to build this firmware into the
kernel. Here is an example where the R8169 driver has been
compiled in but the firmware was not made available. Once the
firmware had been provided, there was no mention of it on
later boots.
dmesg | grep firmware | grep r8169
[ 7.018028] r8169 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for rtl_nic/rtl8168g-2.fw failed with error -2
[ 7.018036] r8169 0000:01:00.0 eth0: unable to load firmware patch rtl_nic/rtl8168g-2.fw (-2)
Identifying the correct firmware will typically require you
to install pciutils-3.7.0, and then use
lspci
to
identify the device. You should then search online to check
which module it uses, which firmware, and where to obtain the
firmware — not all of it is in linux-firmware.
If possible, you should begin by using a wired connection when you first boot your LFS system. To use a wireless connection you will need to use a network tools such as Wireless Tools-29 and wpa_supplicant-2.9.
Different countries have different regulations on the radio
spectrum usage of wireless devices. You can install a
firmware to make the wireless devices obey local spectrum
regulations, so you won't be inquired by local authority or
find your wireless NIC jamming the frequencies of other
devices (for example, remote controllers). The regulatory
database firmware can be downloaded from https://kernel.org/pub/software/network/wireless-regdb/.
To install it, simply extract regulatory.db
and regulatory.db.p7s
from the tarball into
/lib/firmware
. The access point
would send a country code to your wireless NIC, and wpa_supplicant-2.9 would tell the
kernel to load the regulation of this country from
regulatory.db
, and enforce it.
Firmware may also be needed for other devices such as some SCSI controllers, bluetooth adaptors, or TV recorders. The same principles apply.
Last updated on 2020-08-14 03:58:54 -0700
Although most devices needed by packages in BLFS and beyond are
set up properly by udev using
the default rules installed by LFS in /etc/udev/rules.d
, there are cases where the
rules must be modified or augmented.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/aboutdevices
If there are multiple sound cards in a system, the "default"
sound card becomes random. The method to establish sound card
order depends on whether the drivers are modules or not. If
the sound card drivers are compiled into the kernel, control
is via kernel command line parameters in /boot/grub/grub.cfg
. For example, if a
system has both an FM801 card and a SoundBlaster PCI card,
the following can be appended to the command line:
snd-fm801.index=0 snd-ens1371.index=1
If the sound card drivers are built as modules, the order can
be established in the /etc/modprobe.conf
file with:
options snd-fm801 index=0
options snd-ens1371 index=1
USB devices usually have two kinds of device nodes associated with them.
The first kind is created by device-specific drivers (e.g., usb_storage/sd_mod or usblp) in the kernel. For example, a USB mass storage device would be /dev/sdb, and a USB printer would be /dev/usb/lp0. These device nodes exist only when the device-specific driver is loaded.
The second kind of device nodes (/dev/bus/usb/BBB/DDD, where BBB is the bus number and DDD is the device number) are created even if the device doesn't have a kernel driver. By using these "raw" USB device nodes, an application can exchange arbitrary USB packets with the device, i.e., bypass the possibly-existing kernel driver.
Access to raw USB device nodes is needed when a userspace program is acting as a device driver. However, for the program to open the device successfully, the permissions have to be set correctly. By default, due to security concerns, all raw USB devices are owned by user root and group usb, and have 0664 permissions (the read access is needed, e.g., for lsusb to work and for programs to access USB hubs). Packages (such as SANE and libgphoto2) containing userspace USB device drivers also ship udev rules that change the permissions of the controlled raw USB devices. That is, rules installed by SANE change permissions for known scanners, but not printers. If a package maintainer forgot to write a rule for your device, report a bug to both BLFS (if the package is there) and upstream, and you will need to write your own rule.
There is one situation when such fine-grained access control with pre-generated udev rules doesn't work. Namely, PC emulators such as KVM, QEMU and VirtualBox use raw USB device nodes to present arbitrary USB devices to the guest operating system (note: patches are needed in order to get this to work without the obsolete /proc/bus/usb mount point described below). Obviously, maintainers of these packages cannot know which USB devices are going to be connected to the guest operating system. You can either write separate udev rules for all needed USB devices yourself, or use the default catch-all "usb" group, members of which can send arbitrary commands to all USB devices.
Before Linux-2.6.15, raw USB device access was performed not with /dev/bus/usb/BBB/DDD device nodes, but with /proc/bus/usb/BBB/DDD pseudofiles. Some applications (e.g., VMware Workstation) still use only this deprecated technique and can't use the new device nodes. For them to work, use the "usb" group, but remember that members will have unrestricted access to all USB devices. To create the fstab entry for the obsolete usbfs filesystem:
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=14,devmode=0660 0 0
Adding users to the "usb" group is inherently insecure, as they can bypass access restrictions imposed through the driver-specific USB device nodes. For instance, they can read sensitive data from USB hard drives without being in the "disk" group. Avoid adding users to this group, if you can.
Fine-tuning of device attributes such as group name and
permissions is possible by creating extra udev rules, matching on something like
this. The vendor and product can be found by searching the
/sys/devices
directory entries
or using udevadm
info after the device has been attached. See
the documentation in the current udev directory of /usr/share/doc
for details.
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="05d8", SYSFS{idProduct}=="4002", \
GROUP:="scanner", MODE:="0660"
The above line is used for descriptive purposes only. The scanner udev rules are put into place when installing SANE-1.0.29.
In some cases, it makes sense to disable udev completely and create static devices. Servers are one example of this situation. Does a server need the capability of handling dynamic devices? Only the system administrator can answer that question, but in many cases the answer will be no.
If dynamic devices are not desired, then static devices must
be created on the system. In the default configuration, the
/etc/rc.d/rcS.d/S10udev
boot
script mounts a tmpfs
partition over the /dev
directory. This problem can be overcome by mounting the root
partition temporarily:
If the instructions below are not followed carefully, your system could become unbootable.
mount --bind / /mnt cp -a /dev/* /mnt/dev rm /etc/rc.d/rcS.d/{S10udev,S50udev_retry} umount /mnt
At this point, the system will use static devices upon the next reboot. Create any desired additional devices using mknod.
If you want to restore the dynamic devices, recreate the
/etc/rc.d/rcS.d/{S10udev,S50udev_retry}
symbolic links and reboot again. Static devices do not need
to be removed (console and null are always needed) because
they are covered by the tmpfs
partition. Disk usage for devices is negligible (about
20–30 bytes per entry.)
If the initial boot process does not set up the /dev/dvd
device properly, it can be
installed using the following modification to the default
udev rules. As the root
user,
run:
sed '1d;/SYMLINK.*cdrom/ a\ KERNEL=="sr0", ENV{ID_CDROM_DVD}=="1", SYMLINK+="dvd", OPTIONS+="link_priority=-100"' \ /lib/udev/rules.d/60-cdrom_id.rules > /etc/udev/rules.d/60-cdrom_id.rules
Last updated on 2020-06-21 20:09:53 -0700
Together, the /usr/sbin/useradd command and
/etc/skel
directory (both are
easy to set up and use) provide a way to assure new users are
added to your LFS system with the same beginning settings for
things such as the PATH
, keyboard
processing and other environmental variables. Using these two
facilities makes it easier to assure this initial state for
each new user added to the system.
The /etc/skel
directory holds
copies of various initialization and other files that may be
copied to the new user's home directory when the /usr/sbin/useradd program
adds the new user.
The useradd
program uses a collection of default values kept in
/etc/default/useradd
. This file
is created in a base LFS installation by the Shadow package. If it has been removed or
renamed, the useradd program uses some
internal defaults. You can see the default values by running
/usr/sbin/useradd
-D.
To change these values, simply modify the /etc/default/useradd
file as the root
user. An alternative to directly
modifying the file is to run useradd as the root
user while supplying the desired
modifications on the command line. Information on how to do
this can be found in the useradd man page.
To get started, create an /etc/skel
directory and make sure it is
writable only by the system administrator, usually root
. Creating the directory as
root
is the best way to go.
The mode of any files from this part of the book that you put
in /etc/skel
should be writable
only by the owner. Also, since there is no telling what kind of
sensitive information a user may eventually place in their copy
of these files, you should make them unreadable by "group" and
"other".
You can also put other files in /etc/skel
and different permissions may be
needed for them.
Decide which initialization files should be provided in every
(or most) new user's home directory. The decisions you make
will affect what you do in the next two sections, The Bash Shell Startup Files
and The vimrc Files. Some
or all of those files will be useful for root
, any already-existing users, and new
users.
The files from those sections that you might want to place in
/etc/skel
include .inputrc
, .bash_profile
, .bashrc
, .bash_logout
, .dircolors
, and .vimrc
. If you are unsure which of these
should be placed there, just continue to the following
sections, read each section and any references provided, and
then make your decision.
You will run a slightly modified set of commands for files
which are placed in /etc/skel
.
Each section will remind you of this. In brief, the book's
commands have been written for files not added to /etc/skel
and instead just sends the results
to the user's home directory. If the file is going to be in
/etc/skel
, change the book's
command(s) to send output there instead and then just copy the
file from /etc/skel
to the
appropriate directories, like /etc
, ~
or the
home directory of any other user already in the system.
When adding a new user with useradd, use the -m
parameter, which tells useradd to create the user's
home directory and copy files from /etc/skel
(can be overridden) to the new
user's home directory. For example (perform as the root
user):
useradd -m <newuser>
Last updated on 2020-03-25 08:07:11 -0700
Throughout BLFS, many packages install programs that run as
daemons or in some way should have a user or group name
assigned. Generally these names are used to map a user ID (uid)
or group ID (gid) for system use. Generally the specific uid or
gid numbers used by these applications are not significant. The
exception of course, is that root
has a uid and gid of 0 (zero) that is
indeed special. The uid values are stored in /etc/passwd
and the gid values are found in
/etc/group
.
Customarily, Unix systems classify users and groups into two
categories: system users and regular users. The system users
and groups are given low numbers and regular users and groups
have numeric values greater than all the system values. The
cutoff for these numbers is found in two parameters in the
/etc/login.defs
configuration
file. The default UID_MIN value is 1000 and the default GID_MIN
value is 1000. If a specific uid or gid value is not specified
when creating a user with useradd or a group with
groupadd the
values assigned will always be above these cutoff values.
Additionally, the Linux Standard Base recommends that system uid and gid values should be below 100.
Below is a table of suggested uid/gid values used in BLFS beyond those defined in a base LFS installation. These can be changed as desired, but provide a suggested set of consistent values.
Table 3.1. UID/GID Suggested Values
Name | uid | gid |
---|---|---|
bin | 1 | |
lp | 9 | |
adm | 16 | |
atd | 17 | 17 |
messagebus | 18 | 18 |
lpadmin | 19 | |
named | 20 | 20 |
gdm | 21 | 21 |
fcron | 22 | 22 |
systemd-journal | 23 | |
apache | 25 | 25 |
smmsp | 26 | 26 |
polkitd | 27 | 27 |
rpc | 28 | 28 |
exim | 31 | 31 |
postfix | 32 | 32 |
postdrop | 33 | |
sendmail | 34 | |
34 | ||
vmailman | 35 | 35 |
news | 36 | 36 |
kdm | 37 | 37 |
fetchmail | 38 | |
mysql | 40 | 40 |
postgres | 41 | 41 |
dovecot | 42 | 42 |
dovenull | 43 | 43 |
ftp | 45 | 45 |
proftpd | 46 | 46 |
vsftpd | 47 | 47 |
rsyncd | 48 | 48 |
sshd | 50 | 50 |
stunnel | 51 | 51 |
dhcpcd | 52 | 52 |
svn | 56 | 56 |
svntest | 57 | |
games | 60 | 60 |
kvm | 61 | |
wireshark | 62 | |
lightdm | 63 | 63 |
sddm | 64 | 64 |
lightdm | 65 | 65 |
scanner | 70 | |
colord | 71 | 71 |
systemd-bus-proxy | 72 | 72 |
systemd-journal-gateway | 73 | 73 |
systemd-journal-remote | 74 | 74 |
systemd-journal-upload | 75 | 75 |
systemd-network | 76 | 76 |
systemd-resolve | 77 | 77 |
systemd-timesync | 78 | 78 |
systemd-coredump | 79 | 79 |
ldap | 83 | 83 |
avahi | 84 | 84 |
avahi-autoipd | 85 | 85 |
netdev | 86 | |
ntp | 87 | 87 |
unbound | 88 | 88 |
plugdev | 90 | |
wheel | 97 | |
anonymous | 98 | |
nobody | 99 | |
nogroup | 99 |
One value that is missing is 65534. This value is customarily
assigned to the user nobody
and
group nogroup
and is
unnecessary.
Last updated on 2020-04-04 05:23:44 -0700
The shell program /bin/bash
(hereafter referred to as just "the shell") uses a collection
of startup files to help create an environment. Each file has a
specific use and may affect login and interactive environments
differently. The files in the /etc
directory generally provide global
settings. If an equivalent file exists in your home directory
it may override the global settings.
An interactive login shell is started after a successful login,
using /bin/login
, by reading the
/etc/passwd
file. This shell
invocation normally reads /etc/profile
and its private equivalent
~/.bash_profile
(or ~/.profile
if called as /bin/sh) upon startup.
An interactive non-login shell is normally started at the
command-line using a shell program (e.g., [prompt]$
/bin/bash) or by the
/bin/su command.
An interactive non-login shell is also started with a terminal
program such as xterm or konsole from within a
graphical environment. This type of shell invocation normally
copies the parent environment and then reads the user's
~/.bashrc
file for additional
startup configuration instructions.
A non-interactive shell is usually present when a shell script is running. It is non-interactive because it is processing a script and not waiting for user input between commands. For these shell invocations, only the environment inherited from the parent shell is used.
The file ~/.bash_logout
is not
used for an invocation of the shell. It is read and executed
when a user exits from an interactive login shell.
Many distributions use /etc/bashrc
for system wide initialization of
non-login shells. This file is usually called from the user's
~/.bashrc
file and is not built
directly into bash itself. This convention
is followed in this section.
For more information see info bash -- Nodes: Bash Startup Files and Interactive Shells.
Most of the instructions below are used to create files
located in the /etc
directory
structure which requires you to execute the commands as the
root
user. If you elect to
create the files in user's home directories instead, you
should run the commands as an unprivileged user.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/bash-shell-startup-files
Here is a base /etc/profile
.
This file starts by setting up some helper functions and some
basic parameters. It specifies some bash history parameters
and, for security purposes, disables keeping a permanent
history file for the root
user. It also sets a default user prompt. It then calls
small, single purpose scripts in the /etc/profile.d
directory to provide most of
the initialization.
For more information on the escape sequences you can use for
your prompt (i.e., the PS1
environment variable) see info
bash -- Node:
Printing a Prompt.
cat > /etc/profile << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/profile
# Written for Beyond Linux From Scratch
# by James Robertson <[email protected]>
# modifications by Dagmar d'Surreal <[email protected]>
# System wide environment variables and startup programs.
# System wide aliases and functions should go in /etc/bashrc. Personal
# environment variables and startup programs should go into
# ~/.bash_profile. Personal aliases and functions should go into
# ~/.bashrc.
# Functions to help us manage paths. Second argument is the name of the
# path variable to be modified (default: PATH)
pathremove () {
local IFS=':'
local NEWPATH
local DIR
local PATHVARIABLE=${2:-PATH}
for DIR in ${!PATHVARIABLE} ; do
if [ "$DIR" != "$1" ] ; then
NEWPATH=${NEWPATH:+$NEWPATH:}$DIR
fi
done
export $PATHVARIABLE="$NEWPATH"
}
pathprepend () {
pathremove $1 $2
local PATHVARIABLE=${2:-PATH}
export $PATHVARIABLE="$1${!PATHVARIABLE:+:${!PATHVARIABLE}}"
}
pathappend () {
pathremove $1 $2
local PATHVARIABLE=${2:-PATH}
export $PATHVARIABLE="${!PATHVARIABLE:+${!PATHVARIABLE}:}$1"
}
export -f pathremove pathprepend pathappend
# Set the initial path
export PATH=/bin:/usr/bin
if [ $EUID -eq 0 ] ; then
pathappend /sbin:/usr/sbin
unset HISTFILE
fi
# Setup some environment variables.
export HISTSIZE=1000
export HISTIGNORE="&:[bf]g:exit"
# Set some defaults for graphical systems
export XDG_DATA_DIRS=${XDG_DATA_DIRS:-/usr/share/}
export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=${XDG_CONFIG_DIRS:-/etc/xdg/}
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR:-/tmp/xdg-$USER}
# Setup a red prompt for root and a green one for users.
NORMAL="\[\e[0m\]"
RED="\[\e[1;31m\]"
GREEN="\[\e[1;32m\]"
if [[ $EUID == 0 ]] ; then
PS1="$RED\u [ $NORMAL\w$RED ]# $NORMAL"
else
PS1="$GREEN\u [ $NORMAL\w$GREEN ]\$ $NORMAL"
fi
for script in /etc/profile.d/*.sh ; do
if [ -r $script ] ; then
. $script
fi
done
unset script RED GREEN NORMAL
# End /etc/profile
EOF
Now create the /etc/profile.d
directory, where the individual initialization scripts are
placed:
install --directory --mode=0755 --owner=root --group=root /etc/profile.d
Using the bash completion script below is controversial. Not all users like it. It adds many (usually over 1000) lines to the bash environment and makes it difficult to use the 'set' command to examine simple environment variables. Omitting this script does not interfere with the ability of bash to use the tab key for file name completion.
This script imports bash completion scripts, installed by many other BLFS packages, to allow TAB command line completion.
cat > /etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh
# Import bash completion scripts
# If the bash-completion package is installed, use its configuration instead
if [ -f /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
# Check for interactive bash and that we haven't already been sourced.
if [ -n "${BASH_VERSION-}" -a -n "${PS1-}" -a -z "${BASH_COMPLETION_VERSINFO-}" ]; then
# Check for recent enough version of bash.
if [ ${BASH_VERSINFO[0]} -gt 4 ] || \
[ ${BASH_VERSINFO[0]} -eq 4 -a ${BASH_VERSINFO[1]} -ge 1 ]; then
[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/bash_completion" ] && \
. "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/bash_completion"
if shopt -q progcomp && [ -r /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
# Source completion code.
. /usr/share/bash-completion/bash_completion
fi
fi
fi
else
# bash-completions are not installed, use only bash completion directory
if shopt -q progcomp; then
for script in /etc/bash_completion.d/* ; do
if [ -r $script ] ; then
. $script
fi
done
fi
fi
# End /etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh
EOF
Make sure that the directory exists:
install --directory --mode=0755 --owner=root --group=root /etc/bash_completion.d
For a more complete installation, see http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/bash-shell-startup-files#bash-completions.
This script uses the ~/.dircolors
and /etc/dircolors
files to control the
colors of file names in a directory listing. They control
colorized output of things like ls --color. The
explanation of how to initialize these files is at the end
of this section.
cat > /etc/profile.d/dircolors.sh << "EOF"
# Setup for /bin/ls and /bin/grep to support color, the alias is in /etc/bashrc.
if [ -f "/etc/dircolors" ] ; then
eval $(dircolors -b /etc/dircolors)
fi
if [ -f "$HOME/.dircolors" ] ; then
eval $(dircolors -b $HOME/.dircolors)
fi
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
EOF
This script adds some useful paths to the PATH
and can be used to customize other PATH
related environment variables (e.g. LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc)
that may be needed for all users.
cat > /etc/profile.d/extrapaths.sh << "EOF"
if [ -d /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ] ; then
pathappend /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig PKG_CONFIG_PATH
fi
if [ -d /usr/local/bin ]; then
pathprepend /usr/local/bin
fi
if [ -d /usr/local/sbin -a $EUID -eq 0 ]; then
pathprepend /usr/local/sbin
fi
# Set some defaults before other applications add to these paths.
pathappend /usr/share/man MANPATH
pathappend /usr/share/info INFOPATH
EOF
This script sets up the default inputrc
configuration file. If the user
does not have individual settings, it uses the global file.
cat > /etc/profile.d/readline.sh << "EOF"
# Setup the INPUTRC environment variable.
if [ -z "$INPUTRC" -a ! -f "$HOME/.inputrc" ] ; then
INPUTRC=/etc/inputrc
fi
export INPUTRC
EOF
Setting the umask value is important for security. Here the default group write permissions are turned off for system users and when the user name and group name are not the same.
cat > /etc/profile.d/umask.sh << "EOF"
# By default, the umask should be set.
if [ "$(id -gn)" = "$(id -un)" -a $EUID -gt 99 ] ; then
umask 002
else
umask 022
fi
EOF
This script sets an environment variable necessary for native language support. A full discussion on determining this variable can be found on the LFS Bash Shell Startup Files page.
cat > /etc/profile.d/i18n.sh << "EOF"
# Set up i18n variables
export LANG=<ll>
_<CC>
.<charmap>
<@modifiers>
EOF
Here is a base /etc/bashrc
.
Comments in the file should explain everything you need.
cat > /etc/bashrc << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/bashrc
# Written for Beyond Linux From Scratch
# by James Robertson <[email protected]>
# updated by Bruce Dubbs <[email protected]>
# System wide aliases and functions.
# System wide environment variables and startup programs should go into
# /etc/profile. Personal environment variables and startup programs
# should go into ~/.bash_profile. Personal aliases and functions should
# go into ~/.bashrc
# Provides colored /bin/ls and /bin/grep commands. Used in conjunction
# with code in /etc/profile.
alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'
# Provides prompt for non-login shells, specifically shells started
# in the X environment. [Review the LFS archive thread titled
# PS1 Environment Variable for a great case study behind this script
# addendum.]
NORMAL="\[\e[0m\]"
RED="\[\e[1;31m\]"
GREEN="\[\e[1;32m\]"
if [[ $EUID == 0 ]] ; then
PS1="$RED\u [ $NORMAL\w$RED ]# $NORMAL"
else
PS1="$GREEN\u [ $NORMAL\w$GREEN ]\$ $NORMAL"
fi
unset RED GREEN NORMAL
# End /etc/bashrc
EOF
Here is a base ~/.bash_profile
.
If you want each new user to have this file automatically,
just change the output of the command to /etc/skel/.bash_profile
and check the
permissions after the command is run. You can then copy
/etc/skel/.bash_profile
to the
home directories of already existing users, including
root
, and set the owner and
group appropriately.
cat > ~/.bash_profile << "EOF"
# Begin ~/.bash_profile
# Written for Beyond Linux From Scratch
# by James Robertson <[email protected]>
# updated by Bruce Dubbs <[email protected]>
# Personal environment variables and startup programs.
# Personal aliases and functions should go in ~/.bashrc. System wide
# environment variables and startup programs are in /etc/profile.
# System wide aliases and functions are in /etc/bashrc.
if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ] ; then
source $HOME/.bashrc
fi
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
pathprepend $HOME/bin
fi
# Having . in the PATH is dangerous
#if [ $EUID -gt 99 ]; then
# pathappend .
#fi
# End ~/.bash_profile
EOF
Here is a base ~/.profile
. The
comments and instructions for using /etc/skel
for .bash_profile
above also apply here. Only
the target file names are different.
cat > ~/.profile << "EOF"
# Begin ~/.profile
# Personal environment variables and startup programs.
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
pathprepend $HOME/bin
fi
# Set up user specific i18n variables
#export LANG=<ll>
_<CC>
.<charmap>
<@modifiers>
# End ~/.profile
EOF
Here is a base ~/.bashrc
.
cat > ~/.bashrc << "EOF"
# Begin ~/.bashrc
# Written for Beyond Linux From Scratch
# by James Robertson <[email protected]>
# Personal aliases and functions.
# Personal environment variables and startup programs should go in
# ~/.bash_profile. System wide environment variables and startup
# programs are in /etc/profile. System wide aliases and functions are
# in /etc/bashrc.
if [ -f "/etc/bashrc" ] ; then
source /etc/bashrc
fi
# Set up user specific i18n variables
#export LANG=<ll>
_<CC>
.<charmap>
<@modifiers>
# End ~/.bashrc
EOF
This is an empty ~/.bash_logout
that can be used as a template. You will notice that the base
~/.bash_logout
does not include
a clear
command. This is because the clear is handled in the
/etc/issue
file.
cat > ~/.bash_logout << "EOF"
# Begin ~/.bash_logout
# Written for Beyond Linux From Scratch
# by James Robertson <[email protected]>
# Personal items to perform on logout.
# End ~/.bash_logout
EOF
If you want to use the dircolors
capability, then run the
following command. The /etc/skel
setup steps shown above also can
be used here to provide a ~/.dircolors
file when a new user is set
up. As before, just change the output file name on the
following command and assure the permissions, owner, and
group are correct on the files created and/or copied.
dircolors -p > /etc/dircolors
If you wish to customize the colors used for different file
types, you can edit the /etc/dircolors
file. The instructions for
setting the colors are embedded in the file.
Finally, Ian Macdonald has written an excellent collection of tips and tricks to enhance your shell environment. You can read it online at http://www.caliban.org/bash/index.shtml.
Last updated on 2020-08-21 05:19:40 -0700
The LFS book installs Vim as its text editor. At this point it should be noted that there are a lot of different editing applications out there including Emacs, nano, Joe and many more. Anyone who has been around the Internet (especially usenet) for a short time will certainly have observed at least one flame war, usually involving Vim and Emacs users!
The LFS book creates a basic vimrc
file. In this section you'll find an
attempt to enhance this file. At startup, vim reads the global
configuration file (/etc/vimrc
)
as well as a user-specific file (~/.vimrc
). Either or both can be tailored to
suit the needs of your particular system.
Here is a slightly expanded .vimrc
that you can put in ~/.vimrc
to provide user specific effects. Of
course, if you put it into /etc/skel/.vimrc
instead, it will be made
available to users you add to the system later. You can also
copy the file from /etc/skel/.vimrc
to the home directory of
users already on the system, such as root
. Be sure to set permissions, owner,
and group if you do copy anything directly from /etc/skel
.
" Begin .vimrc
set columns=80
set wrapmargin=8
set ruler
" End .vimrc
Note that the comment tags are " instead of the more usual # or
//. This is correct, the syntax for vimrc
is slightly unusual.
Below you'll find a quick explanation of what each of the options in this example file means here:
set columns=80
: This simply
sets the number of columns used on the screen.
set wrapmargin=8
: This is the
number of characters from the right window border where
wrapping starts.
set ruler
: This makes
vim show
the current row and column at the bottom right of the
screen.
More information on the many vim options can be found by
reading the help inside vim itself. Do this by typing
:help
in vim to get the general help,
or by typing :help
usr_toc.txt
to view the User Manual Table of Contents.
Last updated on 2020-03-25 08:07:11 -0700
When you first boot up your new LFS system, the logon screen
will be nice and plain (as it should be in a bare-bones
system). Many people however, will want their system to display
some information in the logon message. This can be accomplished
using the file /etc/issue
.
The /etc/issue
file is a plain
text file which will also accept certain escape sequences (see
below) in order to insert information about the system. There
is also the file issue.net
which
can be used when logging on remotely. ssh however, will only use it
if you set the option in the configuration file and will
not interpret the escape
sequences shown below.
One of the most common things which people want to do is clear
the screen at each logon. The easiest way of doing that is to
put a "clear" escape sequence into /etc/issue
. A simple way of doing this is to
issue the command clear >
/etc/issue. This will insert the relevant
escape code into the start of the /etc/issue
file. Note that if you do this,
when you edit the file, you should leave the characters
(normally '^[[H^[[2J') on the first line alone.
Terminal escape sequences are special codes recognized by the terminal. The ^[ represents an ASCII ESC character. The sequence ESC [ H puts the cursor in the upper left hand corner of the screen and ESC 2 J erases the screen. For more information on terminal escape sequences see http://rtfm.etla.org/xterm/ctlseq.html
The following sequences are recognized by agetty (the program which
usually parses /etc/issue
). This
information is from man
agetty where you can find extra information
about the logon process.
The issue
file can contain
certain character sequences to display various information. All
issue
sequences consist of a
backslash (\) immediately followed by one of the letters
explained below (so \d
in
/etc/issue
would insert the
current date).
b Insert the baudrate of the current line.
d Insert the current date.
s Insert the system name, the name of the operating system.
l Insert the name of the current tty line.
m Insert the architecture identifier of the machine, e.g., i686.
n Insert the nodename of the machine, also known as the hostname.
o Insert the domainname of the machine.
r Insert the release number of the kernel, e.g., 2.6.11.12.
t Insert the current time.
u Insert the number of current users logged in.
U Insert the string "1 user" or "<n> users" where <n> is the
number of current users logged in.
v Insert the version of the OS, e.g., the build-date etc.
Last updated on 2020-03-25 08:07:11 -0700
The Linux kernel supplies a random number generator which is
accessed through /dev/random
and
/dev/urandom
. Programs that
utilize the random and urandom devices, such as OpenSSH, will benefit from these
instructions.
When a Linux system starts up without much operator interaction, the entropy pool (data used to compute a random number) may be in a fairly predictable state. This creates the real possibility that the number generated at startup may always be the same. In order to counteract this effect, you should carry the entropy pool information across your shut-downs and start-ups.
Install the /etc/rc.d/init.d/random
init script included
with the blfs-bootscripts-20200818 package.
make install-random
Last updated on 2020-03-25 08:07:11 -0700
Security takes many forms in a computing environment. After some initial discussion, this chapter gives examples of three different types of security: access, prevention and detection.
Access for users is usually handled by login or an application designed to handle the login function. In this chapter, we show how to enhance login by setting policies with PAM modules. Access via networks can also be secured by policies set by iptables, commonly referred to as a firewall. The Network Security Services (NSS) and Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR) libraries can be installed and shared among the many applications requiring them. For applications that don't offer the best security, you can use the Stunnel package to wrap an application daemon inside an SSL tunnel.
Prevention of breaches, like a trojan, are assisted by applications like GnuPG, specifically the ability to confirm signed packages, which recognizes modifications of the tarball after the packager creates it.
Finally, we touch on detection with a package that stores "signatures" of critical files (defined by the administrator) and then regenerates those "signatures" and compares for files that have been changed.
All software has bugs. Sometimes, a bug can be exploited, for example to allow users to gain enhanced privileges (perhaps gaining a root shell, or simply accessing or deleting other user's files), or to allow a remote site to crash an application (denial of service), or for theft of data. These bugs are labelled as vulnerabilities.
The main place where vulnerabilities get logged is cve.mitre.org. Unfortunately, many vulnerability numbers (CVE-yyyy-nnnn) are initially only labelled as "reserved" when distributions start issuing fixes. Also, some vulnerabilities apply to particular combinations of configure options, or only apply to old versions of packages which have long since been updated in BLFS.
BLFS differs from distributions—there is no BLFS security team, and the editors only become aware of vulnerabilities after they are public knowledge. Sometimes, a package with a vulnerability will not be updated in the book for a long time. Issues can be logged in the Trac system, which might speed up resolution.
The normal way for BLFS to fix a vulnerability is, ideally, to update the book to a new fixed release of the package. Sometimes that happens even before the vulnerability is public knowledge, so there is no guarantee that it will be shown as a vulnerability fix in the Changelog. Alternatively, a sed command, or a patch taken from a distribution, may be appropriate.
The bottom line is that you are responsible for your own security, and for assessing the potential impact of any problems.
To keep track of what is being discovered, you may wish to follow the security announcements of one or more distributions. For example, Debian has Debian security. Fedora's links on security are at the Fedora wiki. Details of Gentoo linux security announcements are discussed at Gentoo security. Finally, the Slackware archives of security announcements are at Slackware security.
The most general English source is perhaps the Full Disclosure Mailing List, but please read the comment on that page. If you use other languages you may prefer other sites such as heise.de (German) or cert.hr (Croatian). These are not linux-specific. There is also a daily update at lwn.net for subscribers (free access to the data after 2 weeks, but their vulnerabilities database at lwn.net/Vulnerabilities is unrestricted).
For some packages, subscribing to their 'announce' lists will provide prompt news of newer versions.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/vulnerabilities
Last updated on 2020-03-24 12:19:44 -0700
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a method to validate the authenticity of an otherwise unknown entity across untrusted networks. PKI works by establishing a chain of trust, rather than trusting each individual host or entity explicitly. In order for a certificate presented by a remote entity to be trusted, that certificate must present a complete chain of certificates that can be validated using the root certificate of a Certificate Authority (CA) that is trusted by the local machine.
Establishing trust with a CA involves validating things like company address, ownership, contact information, etc., and ensuring that the CA has followed best practices, such as undergoing periodic security audits by independent investigators and maintaining an always available certificate revocation list. This is well outside the scope of BLFS (as it is for most Linux distributions). The certificate store provided here is taken from the Mozilla Foundation, who have established very strict inclusion policies described here.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://github.com/djlucas/make-ca/releases/download/v1.7/make-ca-1.7.tar.xz
Download size: 28.5 KB
Download MD5 Sum: e0356f5ae5623f227a3f69b5e8848ec6
Estimated disk space required: 6.6 MB (with all runtime deps)
Estimated build time: 0.1 SBU (with all runtime deps)
p11-kit-0.23.20 (required at runtime to generate certificate stores from trust anchors)
NSS-3.55 (to generate a shared NSSDB)
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/make-ca
The make-ca script will
download and process the certificates included in the
certdata.txt
file for use as
trust anchors for the p11-kit-0.23.20 trust module.
Additionally, it will generate system certificate stores used
by BLFS applications (if the recommended and optional
applications are present on the system). Any local
certificates stored in /etc/ssl/local
will be imported to both the
trust anchors and the generated certificate stores
(overriding Mozilla's trust). Additionally, any modified
trust values will be copied from the trust anchors to
/etc/ssl/local
prior to any
updates, preserving custom trust values that differ from
Mozilla when using the trust utility from
p11-kit to operate on the
trust store.
To install the various certificate stores, first install the
make-ca script into the
correct location. As the root
user:
make install && install -vdm755 /etc/ssl/local
As the root
user, after
installing p11-kit-0.23.20, download the
certificate source and prepare for system use with the
following command:
If running the script a second time with the same version
of certdata.txt
, for
instance, to add additional stores as the requisite
software is installed, add the -r
switch to the command
line. If packaging, run make-ca --help to see all
available command line options.
/usr/sbin/make-ca -g
You should periodically update the store with the above
command, either manually, or via a cron
job. If you've installed
Fcron-3.2.1 and completed the section on
periodic jobs, execute the following commands, as the
root
user, to create a weekly cron job:
cat > /etc/cron.weekly/update-pki.sh << "EOF" &&
#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/make-ca -g
EOF
chmod 754 /etc/cron.weekly/update-pki.sh
For most users, no additional configuration is necessary,
however, the default certdata.txt
file provided by make-ca is
obtained from the mozilla-release branch, and is modified to
provide a Mercurial revision. This will be the correct
version for most systems. There are several other variants of
the file available for use that might be preferred for one
reason or another, including the files shipped with Mozilla
products in this book. RedHat and OpenSUSE, for instance, use
the version included in NSS-3.55. Additional upstream downloads are
available at the links included in /etc/make-ca.conf.dist
. Simply copy the
file to /etc/make-ca.conf
and
edit as appropriate.
There are three trust types that are recognized by the
make-ca script, SSL/TLS,
S/Mime, and code signing. For OpenSSL, these are serverAuth
, emailProtection
, and codeSigning
respectively. If
one of the three trust arguments is omitted, the certificate
is neither trusted, nor rejected for that role. Clients that
use OpenSSL or NSS encountering this certificate will
present a warning to the user. Clients using GnuTLS without p11-kit support are not aware of trusted
certificates. To include this CA into the ca-bundle.crt
, email-ca-bundle.crt
, or objsign-ca-bundle.crt
files (the
GnuTLS legacy bundles), it
must have the appropriate trust arguments.
The /etc/ssl/local
directory is
available to add additional CA certificates to the system.
For instance, you might need to add an organization or
government CA certificate. Files in this directory must be in
the OpenSSL trusted
certificate format. To create an OpenSSL trusted certificate from a
regular PEM encoded file, you need to add trust arguments to
the openssl
command, and create a new certificate. For example, using the
CAcert
roots, if you want to trust both for all three roles, the
following commands will create appropriate OpenSSL trusted
certificates (run as the root
user after Wget-1.20.3 is installed):
wget http://www.cacert.org/certs/root.crt && wget http://www.cacert.org/certs/class3.crt && openssl x509 -in root.crt -text -fingerprint -setalias "CAcert Class 1 root" \ -addtrust serverAuth -addtrust emailProtection -addtrust codeSigning \ > /etc/ssl/local/CAcert_Class_1_root.pem && openssl x509 -in class3.crt -text -fingerprint -setalias "CAcert Class 3 root" \ -addtrust serverAuth -addtrust emailProtection -addtrust codeSigning \ > /etc/ssl/local/CAcert_Class_3_root.pem && /usr/sbin/make-ca -r -f
Occasionally, there may be instances where you don't agree
with Mozilla's inclusion of a particular certificate
authority. If you'd like to override the default trust of a
particular CA, simply create a copy of the existing
certificate in /etc/ssl/local
with different trust arguments. For example, if you'd like to
distrust the "Makebelieve_CA_Root" file, run the following
commands:
openssl x509 -in /etc/ssl/certs/Makebelieve_CA_Root.pem \ -text \ -fingerprint \ -setalias "Disabled Makebelieve CA Root" \ -addreject serverAuth \ -addreject emailProtection \ -addreject codeSigning \ > /etc/ssl/local/Disabled_Makebelieve_CA_Root.pem && /usr/sbin/make-ca -r -f
Last updated on 2020-08-16 23:23:35 -0700
The CrackLib package contains a library used to enforce strong passwords by comparing user selected passwords to words in chosen word lists.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://github.com/cracklib/cracklib/releases/download/v2.9.7/cracklib-2.9.7.tar.bz2
Download MD5 sum: 0d68de25332cee5660850528a385427f
Download size: 592 KB
Estimated disk space required: 4.2 MB
Estimated build time: less than 0.1 SBU
Recommended word list for English-speaking countries (size: 6.7 MB; md5sum: 94e9963e4786294f7fb0f2efd7618551): https://github.com/cracklib/cracklib/releases/download/v2.9.7/cracklib-words-2.9.7.bz2
There are additional word lists available for download, e.g., from http://www.cotse.com/tools/wordlists.htm. CrackLib can utilize as many, or as few word lists you choose to install.
Users tend to base their passwords on regular words of the spoken language, and crackers know that. CrackLib is intended to filter out such bad passwords at the source using a dictionary created from word lists. To accomplish this, the word list(s) for use with CrackLib must be an exhaustive list of words and word-based keystroke combinations likely to be chosen by users of the system as (guessable) passwords.
The default word list recommended above for downloading mostly satisfies this role in English-speaking countries. In other situations, it may be necessary to download (or even create) additional word lists.
Note that word lists suitable for spell-checking are not usable as CrackLib word lists in countries with non-Latin based alphabets, because of “word-based keystroke combinations” that make bad passwords.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/cracklib
Install CrackLib by running the following commands:
sed -i '/skipping/d' util/packer.c && ./configure --prefix=/usr \ --disable-static \ --with-default-dict=/lib/cracklib/pw_dict && make
Now, as the root
user:
make install && mv -v /usr/lib/libcrack.so.* /lib && ln -sfv ../../lib/$(readlink /usr/lib/libcrack.so) /usr/lib/libcrack.so
Issue the following commands as the root
user to install the recommended word
list and create the CrackLib
dictionary. Other word lists (text based, one word per line)
can also be used by simply installing them into /usr/share/dict
and adding them to the
create-cracklib-dict
command.
install -v -m644 -D ../cracklib-words-2.9.7.bz2 \ /usr/share/dict/cracklib-words.bz2 && bunzip2 -v /usr/share/dict/cracklib-words.bz2 && ln -v -sf cracklib-words /usr/share/dict/words && echo $(hostname) >> /usr/share/dict/cracklib-extra-words && install -v -m755 -d /lib/cracklib && create-cracklib-dict /usr/share/dict/cracklib-words \ /usr/share/dict/cracklib-extra-words
If desired, check the proper operation of the library as an unprivileged user by issuing the following command:
make test
If you are installing CrackLib after your LFS system has been completed and you have the Shadow package installed, you must reinstall Shadow-4.8.1 if you wish to provide strong password support on your system. If you are now going to install the Linux-PAM-1.4.0 package, you may disregard this note as Shadow will be reinstalled after the Linux-PAM installation.
sed -i '/skipping/d' util/packer.c: Remove a meaningless warning.
--with-default-dict=/lib/cracklib/pw_dict
:
This parameter forces the installation of the CrackLib dictionary to the /lib
hierarchy.
--disable-static
:
This switch prevents installation of static versions of the
libraries.
mv -v /usr/lib/libcrack.so.2*
/lib and ln -v
-sf ../../lib/libcrack.so.2.9.0 ...: These
two commands move the libcrack.so.2.9.0
library and associated
symlink from /usr/lib
to
/lib
, then recreates the
/usr/lib/libcrack.so
symlink
pointing to the relocated file.
install -v -m644 -D
...: This command creates the /usr/share/dict
directory (if it doesn't
already exist) and installs the compressed word list there.
ln -v -s cracklib-words
/usr/share/dict/words: The word list is
linked to /usr/share/dict/words
as historically, words
is the
primary word list in the /usr/share/dict
directory. Omit this
command if you already have a /usr/share/dict/words
file installed on
your system.
echo $(hostname)
>>...: The value of hostname is echoed to a
file called cracklib-extra-words
. This extra file is
intended to be a site specific list which includes easy to
guess passwords such as company or department names, user
names, product names, computer names, domain names, etc.
create-cracklib-dict ...: This command creates the CrackLib dictionary from the word lists. Modify the command to add any additional word lists you have installed.
is used to determine if a password is strong. |
|
is used to format text files (lowercases all words, removes control characters and sorts the lists). |
|
creates a database with words read from standard input. |
|
displays on standard output the database specified. |
|
is used to create the CrackLib dictionary from the given word list(s). |
|
provides a fast dictionary lookup method for strong password enforcement. |
Last updated on 2020-08-16 21:26:53 -0700
cryptsetup is used to set up transparent encryption of block devices using the kernel crypto API.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/cryptsetup/v2.3/cryptsetup-2.3.3.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: 6c0ce8be21a7687b89354c77757d0c5b
Download size: 11 MB
Estimated disk space required: 34 MB (add 130 MB for tests)
Estimated build time: 0.2 SBU (add 9.6 SBU for tests)
JSON-C-0.15, LVM2-2.03.10, and popt-1.18
libpwquality-1.4.2, Python-2.7.18, argon2, and passwdqc
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/cryptsetup
Encrypted block devices require kernel support. To use it, the appropriate kernel configuration parameters need to be set:
Device Drivers --->
[*] Multiple devices driver support (RAID and LVM) ---> [CONFIG_MD]
<*/M> Device mapper support [CONFIG_BLK_DEV_DM]
<*/M> Crypt target support [CONFIG_DM_CRYPT]
Cryptographic API --->
<*/M> XTS support [CONFIG_CRYPTO_XTS]
<*/M> SHA224 and SHA256 digest algorithm [CONFIG_CRYPTO_SHA256]
<*/M> AES cipher algorithms [CONFIG_CRYPTO_AES]
<*/M> User-space interface for symmetric key cipher algorithms
[CONFIG_CRYPTO_USER_API_SKCIPHER]
For tests:
<*/M> Twofish cipher algorithm [CONFIG_CRYPTO_TWOFISH]
Install cryptsetup by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr && make
To test the result, issue as the root
user: make check. Some tests may
fail if the kernel configuration parameters above are not
set.
Now, as the root
user:
make install
Because of the number of possible configurations, setup of encrypted volumes is beyond the scope of the BLFS book. Please see the configuration guide in the cryptsetup FAQ.
is used to setup dm-crypt managed device-mapper mappings. |
|
is a for offline LUKS device re-encryption. |
|
is a tool to manage dm-integrity (block level integrity) volumes. |
|
is used to configure dm-verity managed device-mapper mappings. Device-mapper verity target provides read-only transparent integrity checking of block devices using kernel crypto API. |
Last updated on 2020-08-16 21:26:53 -0700
The Cyrus SASL package contains a Simple Authentication and Security Layer, a method for adding authentication support to connection-based protocols. To use SASL, a protocol includes a command for identifying and authenticating a user to a server and for optionally negotiating protection of subsequent protocol interactions. If its use is negotiated, a security layer is inserted between the protocol and the connection.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://github.com/cyrusimap/cyrus-sasl/releases/download/cyrus-sasl-2.1.27/cyrus-sasl-2.1.27.tar.gz
Download MD5 sum: a33820c66e0622222c5aefafa1581083
Download size: 3.9 MB
Estimated disk space required: 26 MB
Estimated build time: 0.1 SBU
Linux-PAM-1.4.0, MIT Kerberos V5-1.18.2, MariaDB-10.5.5 or MySQL, OpenJDK-14.0.1, OpenLDAP-2.4.51, PostgreSQL-12.4, SQLite-3.33.0, krb4, Dmalloc, Pod::POM::View::Restructured, and Sphinx
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/cyrus-sasl
This package does not support parallel build.
First, fix a build failure if Sphinx or docutils-0.16 is installed on the system:
patch -Np1 -i ../cyrus-sasl-2.1.27-doc_fixes-1.patch
Install Cyrus SASL by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --enable-auth-sasldb \ --with-dbpath=/var/lib/sasl/sasldb2 \ --with-saslauthd=/var/run/saslauthd && make -j1
This package does not come with a test suite. If you are planning on using the GSSAPI authentication mechanism, test it after installing the package using the sample server and client programs which were built in the preceding step. Instructions for performing the tests can be found at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/cyrus-sasl.txt.
Now, as the root
user:
make install && install -v -dm755 /usr/share/doc/cyrus-sasl-2.1.27/html && install -v -m644 saslauthd/LDAP_SASLAUTHD /usr/share/doc/cyrus-sasl-2.1.27 && install -v -m644 doc/legacy/*.html /usr/share/doc/cyrus-sasl-2.1.27/html && install -v -dm700 /var/lib/sasl
--with-dbpath=/var/lib/sasl/sasldb2
:
This switch forces the sasldb database to be
created in /var/lib/sasl
instead of /etc
.
--with-saslauthd=/var/run/saslauthd
:
This switch forces saslauthd to use the FHS
compliant directory /var/run/saslauthd
for variable run-time
data.
--enable-auth-sasldb
:
This switch enables SASLDB authentication backend.
--with-dblib=gdbm
: This switch
forces GDBM to be used
instead of Berkeley DB.
--with-ldap
: This switch enables
the OpenLDAP support.
--enable-ldapdb
: This switch
enables the LDAPDB authentication backend. There is a
circular dependency with this parameter. See http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/cyrus-sasl
for a solution to this problem.
--enable-java
: This switch
enables compiling of the Java support libraries.
--enable-login
: This option
enables unsupported LOGIN authentication.
--enable-ntlm
: This option
enables unsupported NTLM authentication.
install -v -m644 ...: These commands install documentation which is not installed by the make install command.
install -v -m700 -d /var/lib/sasl: This directory must exist when starting saslauthd or using the sasldb plugin. If you're not going to be running the daemon or using the plugins, you may omit the creation of this directory.
/etc/saslauthd.conf
(for
saslauthd
LDAP configuration) and /etc/sasl2/Appname.conf
(where "Appname"
is the application defined name of the application)
See https://www.cyrusimap.org/sasl/sasl/sysadmin.html for information on what to include in the application configuration files.
See file:///usr/share/doc/cyrus-sasl-2.1.27/LDAP_SASLAUTHD for configuring saslauthd with OpenLDAP.
See https://www.cyrusimap.org/sasl/sasl/gssapi.html#gssapi for configuring saslauthd with Kerberos.
If you need to run the saslauthd daemon at
system startup, install the /etc/rc.d/init.d/saslauthd
init script
included in the blfs-bootscripts-20200818 package
using the following command:
make install-saslauthd
You'll need to modify /etc/sysconfig/saslauthd
and modify the
AUTHMECH
parameter with your
desired authentication mechanism.
is used to list loadable SASL plugins and their properties. |
|
is the SASL authentication server. |
|
is used to list the users in the SASL password
database |
|
is used to set and delete a user's SASL password
and mechanism specific secrets in the SASL password
database |
|
is a test utility for the SASL authentication server. |
|
is a general purpose authentication library for server and client applications. |
Last updated on 2020-08-16 21:26:53 -0700
The GnuPG package is GNU's tool for secure communication and data storage. It can be used to encrypt data and to create digital signatures. It includes an advanced key management facility and is compliant with the proposed OpenPGP Internet standard as described in RFC2440 and the S/MIME standard as described by several RFCs. GnuPG 2 is the stable version of GnuPG integrating support for OpenPGP and S/MIME.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://www.gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-2.2.21.tar.bz2
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-2.2.21.tar.bz2
Download MD5 sum: 97fa4809da1e8f24fcb0ed7205b2f484
Download size: 6.5 MB
Estimated disk space required: 152 MB (with all tests; add 24 MB for docs)
Estimated build time: 0.3 SBU (using parallelism=4; add 1.6 SBU for tests)
Libassuan-2.5.3, libgcrypt-1.8.6, Libksba-1.4.0, and npth-1.6
pinentry-1.1.0 (Run-time requirement for most of the package's functionality)
cURL-7.71.1, Fuse-3.9.3, GnuTLS-3.6.14, ImageMagick-7.0.10-27 (for the convert utility, used for generating the documentation), libusb-1.0.23, an MTA, OpenLDAP-2.4.51, SQLite-3.33.0, texlive-20200406 (or install-tl-unx), fig2dev (for generating documentation), and GNU adns
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/gnupg2
By default GnuPG doesn't install the deprecated gpg-zip script, but it is still needed by some programs. Make GnuPG install it with:
sed -e '/noinst_SCRIPTS = gpg-zip/c sbin_SCRIPTS += gpg-zip' \ -i tools/Makefile.in
Install GnuPG by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr \ --enable-symcryptrun \ --localstatedir=/var \ --docdir=/usr/share/doc/gnupg-2.2.21 && make && makeinfo --html --no-split -o doc/gnupg_nochunks.html doc/gnupg.texi && makeinfo --plaintext -o doc/gnupg.txt doc/gnupg.texi && make -C doc html
If you have texlive-20200406 installed and you wish to create documentation in alternate formats, issue the following commands (fig2dev is needed for the ps format):
make -C doc pdf ps
To test the results, issue: make check.
Note that if you have already installed GnuPG, the instructions below will
overwrite /usr/share/man/man1/gpg-zip.1
. Now, as the
root
user:
make install && install -v -m755 -d /usr/share/doc/gnupg-2.2.21/html && install -v -m644 doc/gnupg_nochunks.html \ /usr/share/doc/gnupg-2.2.21/html/gnupg.html && install -v -m644 doc/*.texi doc/gnupg.txt \ /usr/share/doc/gnupg-2.2.21 && install -v -m644 doc/gnupg.html/* \ /usr/share/doc/gnupg-2.2.21/html
If you created alternate formats of the documentation,
install them using the following command as the root
user:
install -v -m644 doc/gnupg.{pdf,dvi,ps} \ /usr/share/doc/gnupg-2.2.21
sed ... tools/Makefile.in: This command is needed to build the gpg-zip program.
--docdir=/usr/share/doc/gnupg-2.2.21
:
This switch changes the default docdir to /usr/share/doc/gnupg-2.2.21
.
--enable-symcryptrun
:
This switch enables building the symcryptrun program.
--enable-all-tests
: allows more
tests to be run with make
check.
--enable-g13
: This switch enables
building the g13 program.
is used to create and populate a user's
|
|
is a wrapper script used to run gpgconf with the
|
|
is a tool that takes care of accessing the OpenPGP keyservers. |
|
is a tool to contact a running dirmngr and test whether a certificate has been revoked. |
|
is a tool to create, mount or unmount an encrypted file system container (optional). |
|
is a daemon used to manage secret (private) keys independently from any protocol. It is used as a backend for gpg2 and gpgsm as well as for a couple of other utilities. |
|
is a utility used to communicate with a running gpg-agent. |
|
is the OpenPGP part of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). It is a tool used to provide digital encryption and signing services using the OpenPGP standard. |
|
is a utility used to automatically and reasonably
safely query and modify configuration files in the
|
|
is a utility currently only useful for debugging.
Run it with |
|
executes the given scheme program or spawns an interactive shell. |
|
is a tool similar to gpg2 used to provide digital encryption and signing services on X.509 certificates and the CMS protocol. It is mainly used as a backend for S/MIME mail processing. |
|
is a tool to encrypt or sign files into an archive. |
|
is a verify only version of gpg2. |
|
provides a server for the Web Key Service protocol. |
|
encrypts or signs files into an archive. |
|
is used to list, export and import Keybox data. |
|
is a simple symmetric encryption tool. |
|
is used to listen to a Unix Domain socket created by any of the GnuPG tools. |
Last updated on 2020-08-17 15:12:09 -0700
The GnuTLS package contains libraries and userspace tools which provide a secure layer over a reliable transport layer. Currently the GnuTLS library implements the proposed standards by the IETF's TLS working group. Quoting from the TLS protocol specification:
“The TLS protocol provides communications privacy over the Internet. The protocol allows client/server applications to communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery.”
GnuTLS provides support for TLS 1.3, TLS 1.2, TLS 1.1, TLS 1.0, and SSL 3.0 protocols, TLS extensions, including server name and max record size. Additionally, the library supports authentication using the SRP protocol, X.509 certificates and OpenPGP keys, along with support for the TLS Pre-Shared-Keys (PSK) extension, the Inner Application (TLS/IA) extension and X.509 and OpenPGP certificate handling.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://www.gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gnutls/v3.6/gnutls-3.6.14.tar.xz
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/gnutls/v3.6/gnutls-3.6.14.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: bf70632d420e421baff482247f01dbfe
Download size: 5.8 MB
Estimated disk space required: 158 MB (add 115 MB for tests)
Estimated build time: 0.7 SBU (using parallelism=4; add 8.2 SBU for tests)
make-ca-1.7, libunistring-0.9.10, libtasn1-4.16.0, and p11-kit-0.23.20
Doxygen-1.8.19, GTK-Doc-1.32, Guile-3.0.4, libidn-1.36 or libidn2-2.3.0, libseccomp-2.5.0, Net-tools-CVS_20101030 (used during the test suite), texlive-20200406 or install-tl-unx, Unbound-1.11.0 (to build the DANE library), Valgrind-3.16.1 (used during the test suite), autogen, cmocka and datefudge (used during the test suite if the DANE library is built), and Trousers (Trusted Platform Module support)
Note that if you do not install libtasn1-4.16.0, an older version shipped in the GnuTLS tarball will be used instead.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/gnutls
Install GnuTLS by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr \ --docdir=/usr/share/doc/gnutls-3.6.14 \ --disable-guile \ --with-default-trust-store-pkcs11="pkcs11:" && make
To test the results, issue: make check. If a prior
version of GnuTLS (or the
same version but without all of the recommended dependencies)
has been installed, some tests may fail. If /usr/lib/libgnutls.so
and the target of
that symlink are moved or renamed so that they cannot be
found, all tests should pass and the install procedure will
restore libgnutls.so
and the
versioned library it points to.
Now, as the root
user:
make install
If you passed --enable-gtk-doc
to
the configure
script, the API will automatically be installed. Otherwise,
if desired, you can still install the API documentation to
the /usr/share/gtk-doc/html/gnutls
directory
using the following command as the root
user:
make -C doc/reference install-data-local
--with-default-trust-store-pkcs11="pkcs11:"
:
This switch tells gnutls to use the PKCS #11 trust store as
the default trust. Omit this switch if p11-kit-0.23.20 is not
installed.
--disable-guile
: This
switch disables GUILE support, since GnuTLS does not support
Guile-2.2.x yet.
--with-default-trust-store-file=/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
:
This switch tells configure where to find the
legacy CA certificate bundle and to use it instead of PKCS
#11 module by default. Use this if p11-kit-0.23.20 is not
installed.
--enable-gtk-doc
: Use this
parameter if GTK-Doc is
installed and you wish to rebuild and install the API
documentation.
--enable-openssl-compatibility
:
Use this switch if you wish to build the OpenSSL
compatibility library.
--without-p11-kit
: use this
switch if you have not installed p11-kit.
--with-included-unistring
: uses
the bundled version of libunistring, instead of the system
one. Use this switch if you have not installed libunistring-0.9.10.
is used to generate X.509 certificates, certificate requests, and private keys. |
|
is a tool used to generate and check DNS resource records for the DANE protocol. |
|
is a simple client program to set up a TLS connection to some other computer. |
|
is a simple client program to set up a TLS connection to some other computer and produces very verbose progress results. |
|
is a simple server program that listens to incoming TLS connections. |
|
is a program that can parse and print information about OCSP requests/responses, generate requests and verify responses. |
|
is a program that allows handling data from PKCS #11 smart cards and security modules. |
|
is a simple program that generates random keys for use with TLS-PSK. |
|
is a simple program that emulates the programs in the Stanford SRP (Secure Remote Password) libraries using GnuTLS. |
|
contains the core API functions and X.509 certificate API functions. |
Last updated on 2020-08-16 21:12:39 -0700
The GPGME package is a C library that allows cryptography support to be added to a program. It is designed to make access to public key crypto engines like GnuPG or GpgSM easier for applications. GPGME provides a high-level crypto API for encryption, decryption, signing, signature verification and key management.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://www.gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gpgme/gpgme-1.14.0.tar.bz2
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.gnupg.org/gcrypt/gpgme/gpgme-1.14.0.tar.bz2
Download MD5 sum: e1be12b1aeabdf24a0b663c3c42747ac
Download size: 1.6 MB
Estimated disk space required: 131 MB
Estimated build time: 0.3 SBU (with parallelism=4; with all bindings, add 0.5 SBU for tests)
Doxygen-1.8.19 and Graphviz-2.44.1 (for API documentation), GnuPG-2.2.21 (required if Qt or SWIG are installed; used during the testsuite), Clisp-2.49, Python-2.7.18, Qt-5.15.0, and/or SWIG-4.0.2 (for language bindings)
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/gpgme
Install GPGME by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-gpg-test && make
To test the results, you should have GnuPG-2.2.21 installed and remove the --disable-gpg-test above. Issue: make -k check.
Now, as the root
user:
make install
--disable-gpg-test
:
if this parameter is not passed to configure, the test
programs are built during make stage, which requires
GnuPG-2.2.21. This parameter is not needed
if GnuPG-2.2.21 is installed.
is used to obtain GPGME compilation and linking information. |
|
outputs GPGME commands in JSON format. |
|
prints fingerprint and keyid with keyservers. |
|
contains the GPGME API functions. |
|
contains the C++ GPGME API functions. |
|
contains API functions for handling GPG operations in Qt applications. |
Last updated on 2020-08-16 21:26:53 -0700
The Haveged package contains a daemon that generates an unpredictable stream of random numbers and feeds the /dev/random device.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://github.com/jirka-h/haveged/archive/v1.9.13/haveged-1.9.13.tar.gz
Download MD5 sum: 5391978794208b6cca6f53d7a6211c04
Download size: 488 KB
Estimated disk space required: 21 MB (with tests)
Estimated build time: 0.1 SBU (with tests)
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/haveged
Install Haveged by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr && make
To test the results, issue: make check.
Now, as the root
user:
make install && mkdir -pv /usr/share/doc/haveged-1.9.13 && cp -v README /usr/share/doc/haveged-1.9.13
If you want the Haveged
daemon to start automatically when the system is booted,
install the /etc/rc.d/init.d/haveged
init script
included in the blfs-bootscripts-20200818 package
(as the root
user):
make install-haveged
Last updated on 2020-08-16 08:28:54 -0700
iptables is a userspace command line program used to configure Linux 2.4 and later kernel packet filtering ruleset.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): http://www.netfilter.org/projects/iptables/files/iptables-1.8.5.tar.bz2
Download (FTP): ftp://ftp.netfilter.org/pub/iptables/iptables-1.8.5.tar.bz2
Download MD5 sum: 42cfa96d4ac5eb93ee7ed8dd85cfe8fb
Download size: 700 KB
Estimated disk space required: 17 MB
Estimated build time: 0.2 SBU
libpcap-1.9.1 (required for nfsypproxy support), bpf-utils (required for Berkely Packet Filter support), libnfnetlink (required for connlabel support), libnetfilter_conntrack", and (required for connlabel support) nftables
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/iptables
A firewall in Linux is accomplished through the netfilter interface. To use iptables to configure netfilter, the following kernel configuration parameters are required:
[*] Networking support ---> [CONFIG_NET]
Networking Options --->
[*] Network packet filtering framework (Netfilter) ---> [CONFIG_NETFILTER]
[*] Advanced netfilter configuration [CONFIG_NETFILTER_ADVANCED]
Core Netfilter Configuration --->
<*/M> Netfilter connection tracking support [CONFIG_NF_CONNTRACK]
<*/M> Netfilter Xtables support (required for ip_tables) [CONFIG_NETFILTER_XTABLES]
<*/M> LOG target support [CONFIG_NETFILTER_XT_TARGET_LOG]
IP: Netfilter Configuration --->
<*/M> IP tables support (required for filtering/masq/NAT) [CONFIG_IP_NF_IPTABLES]
Include any connection tracking protocols that will be used, as well as any protocols that you wish to use for match support under the "Core Netfilter Configuration" section. The above options are enough for running Creating a Personal Firewall With iptables below.
The installation below does not include building some
specialized extension libraries which require the raw
headers in the Linux
source code. If you wish to build the additional extensions
(if you aren't sure, then you probably don't), you can look
at the INSTALL
file to see an
example of how to change the KERNEL_DIR=
parameter to
point at the Linux source
code. Note that if you upgrade the kernel version, you may
also need to recompile iptables and that the BLFS team has
not tested using the raw kernel headers.
Install iptables by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr \ --sbindir=/sbin \ --disable-nftables \ --enable-libipq \ --with-xtlibdir=/lib/xtables && make
This package does not come with a test suite.
Now, as the root
user:
make install && ln -sfv ../../sbin/xtables-legacy-multi /usr/bin/iptables-xml && for file in ip4tc ip6tc ipq xtables do mv -v /usr/lib/lib${file}.so.* /lib && ln -sfv ../../lib/$(readlink /usr/lib/lib${file}.so) /usr/lib/lib${file}.so done
--disable-nftables
:
This switch disables building nftables compat.
--enable-libipq
: This
switch enables building of libipq.so
which can be used by some
packages outside of BLFS.
--with-xtlibdir=/lib/xtables
:
Ensure all iptables modules
are installed in the /lib/xtables
directory.
--enable-nfsynproxy
: This switch
enables installation of nfsynproxy SYNPROXY configuration tool.
ln -sfv ../../sbin/xtables-legacy-multi /usr/bin/iptables-xml: Ensure the symbolic link for iptables-xml is relative.
In the following example configurations, LAN1 is used for the internal LAN interface, and WAN1 is used for the external interace connected to the Internet. You will need to replace these values with appropriate interface names for your system.
A Personal Firewall is designed to let you access all the services offered on the Internet, but keep your box secure and your data private.
Below is a slightly modified version of Rusty Russell's recommendation from the Linux 2.4 Packet Filtering HOWTO. It is still applicable to the Linux 3.x kernels.
cat > /etc/rc.d/rc.iptables << "EOF"
#!/bin/sh
# Begin rc.iptables
# Insert connection-tracking modules
# (not needed if built into the kernel)
modprobe nf_conntrack
modprobe xt_LOG
# Enable broadcast echo Protection
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts
# Disable Source Routed Packets
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/accept_source_route
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/default/accept_source_route
# Enable TCP SYN Cookie Protection
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_syncookies
# Disable ICMP Redirect Acceptance
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/default/accept_redirects
# Do not send Redirect Messages
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/send_redirects
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/default/send_redirects
# Drop Spoofed Packets coming in on an interface, where responses
# would result in the reply going out a different interface.
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/rp_filter
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/default/rp_filter
# Log packets with impossible addresses.
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/log_martians
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/default/log_martians
# be verbose on dynamic ip-addresses (not needed in case of static IP)
echo 2 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_dynaddr
# disable Explicit Congestion Notification
# too many routers are still ignorant
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn
# Set a known state
iptables -P INPUT DROP
iptables -P FORWARD DROP
iptables -P OUTPUT DROP
# These lines are here in case rules are already in place and the
# script is ever rerun on the fly. We want to remove all rules and
# pre-existing user defined chains before we implement new rules.
iptables -F
iptables -X
iptables -Z
iptables -t nat -F
# Allow local-only connections
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
# Free output on any interface to any ip for any service
# (equal to -P ACCEPT)
iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT
# Permit answers on already established connections
# and permit new connections related to established ones
# (e.g. port mode ftp)
iptables -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
# Log everything else. What's Windows' latest exploitable vulnerability?
iptables -A INPUT -j LOG --log-prefix "FIREWALL:INPUT "
# End $rc_base/rc.iptables
EOF
chmod 700 /etc/rc.d/rc.iptables
This script is quite simple, it drops all traffic coming into your computer that wasn't initiated from your computer, but as long as you are simply surfing the Internet you are unlikely to exceed its limits.
If you frequently encounter certain delays at accessing FTP servers, take a look at BusyBox with iptable example number 4.
Even if you have daemons or services running on your system, these will be inaccessible everywhere but from your computer itself. If you want to allow access to services on your machine, such as ssh or ping, take a look at Creating a BusyBox With iptables.
A network Firewall has two interfaces, one connected to an intranet, in this example LAN1, and one connected to the Internet, here WAN1. To provide the maximum security for the firewall itself, make sure that there are no unnecessary servers running on it such as X11 et al. As a general principle, the firewall itself should not access any untrusted service (think of a remote server giving answers that makes a daemon on your system crash, or even worse, that implements a worm via a buffer-overflow).
cat > /etc/rc.d/rc.iptables << "EOF"
#!/bin/sh
# Begin rc.iptables
echo
echo "You're using the example configuration for a setup of a firewall"
echo "from Beyond Linux From Scratch."
echo "This example is far from being complete, it is only meant"
echo "to be a reference."
echo "Firewall security is a complex issue, that exceeds the scope"
echo "of the configuration rules below."
echo "You can find additional information"
echo "about firewalls in Chapter 4 of the BLFS book."
echo "http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs"
echo
# Insert iptables modules (not needed if built into the kernel).
modprobe nf_conntrack
modprobe nf_conntrack_ftp
modprobe xt_conntrack
modprobe xt_LOG
modprobe xt_state
# Enable broadcast echo Protection
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts
# Disable Source Routed Packets
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/accept_source_route
# Enable TCP SYN Cookie Protection
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_syncookies
# Disable ICMP Redirect Acceptance
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/accept_redirects
# Don't send Redirect Messages
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/default/send_redirects
# Drop Spoofed Packets coming in on an interface where responses
# would result in the reply going out a different interface.
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/default/rp_filter
# Log packets with impossible addresses.
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/log_martians
# Be verbose on dynamic ip-addresses (not needed in case of static IP)
echo 2 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_dynaddr
# Disable Explicit Congestion Notification
# Too many routers are still ignorant
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn
# Set a known state
iptables -P INPUT DROP
iptables -P FORWARD DROP
iptables -P OUTPUT DROP
# These lines are here in case rules are already in place and the
# script is ever rerun on the fly. We want to remove all rules and
# pre-existing user defined chains before we implement new rules.
iptables -F
iptables -X
iptables -Z
iptables -t nat -F
# Allow local connections
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -o lo -j ACCEPT
# Allow forwarding if the initiated on the intranet
iptables -A FORWARD -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD ! -i WAN1 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT
# Do masquerading
# (not needed if intranet is not using private ip-addresses)
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o WAN1 -j MASQUERADE
# Log everything for debugging
# (last of all rules, but before policy rules)
iptables -A INPUT -j LOG --log-prefix "FIREWALL:INPUT "
iptables -A FORWARD -j LOG --log-prefix "FIREWALL:FORWARD "
iptables -A OUTPUT -j LOG --log-prefix "FIREWALL:OUTPUT "
# Enable IP Forwarding
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
EOF
chmod 700 /etc/rc.d/rc.iptables
With this script your intranet should be reasonably secure against external attacks. No one should be able to setup a new connection to any internal service and, if it's masqueraded, makes your intranet invisible to the Internet. Furthermore, your firewall should be relatively safe because there are no services running that a cracker could attack.
This scenario isn't too different from the Creating a Masquerading Router With iptables, but additionally offers some services to your intranet. Examples of this can be when you want to administer your firewall from another host on your intranet or use it as a proxy or a name server.
Outlining specifically how to protect a server that offers services on the Internet goes far beyond the scope of this document. See the references in the section called “Extra Information” for more information.
Be cautious. Every service you have enabled makes your setup more complex and your firewall less secure. You are exposed to the risks of misconfigured services or running a service with an exploitable bug. A firewall should generally not run any extra services. See the introduction to the Creating a Masquerading Router With iptables for some more details.
If you want to add services such as internal Samba or name servers that do not need to access the Internet themselves, the additional statements are quite simple and should still be acceptable from a security standpoint. Just add the following lines into the script before the logging rules.
iptables -A INPUT -i ! WAN1 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -o ! WAN1 -j ACCEPT
If daemons, such as squid, have to access the Internet themselves, you could open OUTPUT generally and restrict INPUT.
iptables -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT
However, it is generally not advisable to leave OUTPUT unrestricted. You lose any control over trojans who would like to "call home", and a bit of redundancy in case you've (mis-)configured a service so that it broadcasts its existence to the world.
To accomplish this, you should restrict INPUT and OUTPUT on all ports except those that it's absolutely necessary to have open. Which ports you have to open depends on your needs: mostly you will find them by looking for failed accesses in your log files.
Have a Look at the Following Examples:
Squid is caching the web:
iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --sport 80 -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED \
-j ACCEPT
Your caching name server (e.g., named) does its lookups via UDP:
iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT
You want to be able to ping your computer to ensure it's still alive:
iptables -A INPUT -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type echo-request -j ACCEPT
iptables -A OUTPUT -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type echo-reply -j ACCEPT
If you are frequently accessing FTP servers or enjoy chatting, you might notice delays because some implementations of these daemons query an identd daemon on your system to obtain usernames. Although there's really little harm in this, having an identd running is not recommended because many security experts feel the service gives out too much additional information.
To avoid these delays you could reject the requests with a 'tcp-reset' response:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 113 -j REJECT --reject-with tcp-reset
To log and drop invalid packets (packets that came in after netfilter's timeout or some types of network scans) insert these rules at the top of the chain:
iptables -I INPUT 0 -p tcp -m conntrack --ctstate INVALID \
-j LOG --log-prefix "FIREWALL:INVALID "
iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp -m conntrack --ctstate INVALID -j DROP
Anything coming from the outside should not have a private address, this is a common attack called IP-spoofing:
iptables -A INPUT -i WAN1 -s 10.0.0.0/8 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -i WAN1 -s 172.16.0.0/12 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -i WAN1 -s 192.168.0.0/16 -j DROP
There are other addresses that you may also want to drop: 0.0.0.0/8, 127.0.0.0/8, 224.0.0.0/3 (multicast and experimental), 169.254.0.0/16 (Link Local Networks), and 192.0.2.0/24 (IANA defined test network).
If your firewall is a DHCP client, you need to allow those packets:
iptables -A INPUT -i WAN1 -p udp -s 0.0.0.0 --sport 67 \
-d 255.255.255.255 --dport 68 -j ACCEPT
To simplify debugging and be fair to anyone who'd like to access a service you have disabled, purposely or by mistake, you could REJECT those packets that are dropped.
Obviously this must be done directly after logging as the very last lines before the packets are dropped by policy:
iptables -A INPUT -j REJECT
These are only examples to show you some of the
capabilities of the firewall code in Linux. Have a look at
the man page of iptables. There you will find much more
information. The port numbers needed for this can be found
in /etc/services
, in case you
didn't find them by trial and error in your log file.
To set up the iptables firewall at boot, install the
/etc/rc.d/init.d/iptables
init script included in the blfs-bootscripts-20200818 package.
make install-iptables
is used to set up, maintain, and inspect the tables of IP packet filter rules in the Linux kernel. |
|
is used to restore IP Tables from data specified on STDIN. Use I/O redirection provided by your shell to read from a file. |
|
is used to dump the contents of an IP Table in easily parseable format to STDOUT. Use I/O-redirection provided by your shell to write to a file. |
|
is used to convert the output of iptables-save to
an XML format. Using the |
|
are a set of commands for IPV6 that parallel the iptables commands above. |
|
(optional) configuration tool. SYNPROXY target makes handling of large SYN floods possible without the large performance penalties imposed by the connection tracking in such cases. |
|
is a binary that behaves according to the name it is called by. |
Last updated on 2020-08-17 14:05:41 -0700
The purpose of a firewall is to protect a computer or a network against malicious access. In a perfect world every daemon or service, on every machine, is perfectly configured and immune to security flaws, and all users are trusted implicitly to use the equipment as intended. However, this is rarely, if ever, the case. Daemons may be misconfigured, or updates may not have been applied for known exploits against essential services. Additionally, you may wish to choose which services are accessible by certain machines or users, or you may wish to limit which machines or applications are allowed external access. Alternatively, you simply may not trust some of your applications or users. For these reasons, a carefully designed firewall should be an essential part of system security.
While a firewall can greatly limit the scope of the above issues, do not assume that having a firewall makes careful configuration redundant, or that any negligent misconfiguration is harmless. A firewall does not prevent the exploitation of any service you offer outside of it. Despite having a firewall, you need to keep applications and daemons properly configured and up to date.
The word firewall can have several different meanings.
This is a hardware device or software program, intended to secure a home or desktop computer connected to the Internet. This type of firewall is highly relevant for users who do not know how their computers might be accessed via the Internet or how to disable that access, especially if they are always online and connected via broadband links.
An example configuration for a personal firewall is provided at Creating a Personal Firewall With iptables.
This is a system placed between the Internet and an intranet. To minimize the risk of compromising the firewall itself, it should generally have only one role—that of protecting the intranet. Although not completely risk-free, the tasks of doing the routing and IP masquerading (rewriting IP headers of the packets it routes from clients with private IP addresses onto the Internet so that they seem to come from the firewall itself) are commonly considered relatively secure.
An example configuration for a masquerading firewall is provided at Creating a Masquerading Router With iptables.
This is often an old computer you may have retired and nearly forgotten, performing masquerading or routing functions, but offering non-firewall services such as a web-cache or mail. This may be used for home networks, but is not to be considered as secure as a firewall only machine because the combination of server and router/firewall on one machine raises the complexity of the setup.
An example configuration for a BusyBox is provided at Creating a BusyBox With iptables.
This type of firewall performs masquerading or routing, but grants public access to some branch of your network that is physically separated from your regular intranet and is essentially a separate network with direct Internet access. The servers on this network are those which must be easily accessible from both the Internet and intranet. The firewall protects both networks. This type of firewall has a minimum of three network interfaces.
The example configurations provided for iptables-1.8.5 are not intended to be a complete guide to securing systems. Firewalling is a complex issue that requires careful configuration. The configurations provided by BLFS are intended only to give examples of how a firewall works. They are not intended to fit any particular configuration and may not provide complete protection from an attack.
BLFS provides an utility to manage the kernel Netfilter interface, iptables-1.8.5. It has been around since early 2.4 kernels, and has been the standard since. This is likely the set of tools that will be most familiar to existing admins. Other tools have been developped more recently, see the list of further readings below for more details. Here you will find a list of URLs that contain comprehensive information about building firewalls and further securing your system.
www.netfilter.org - Homepage of the netfilter/iptables/nftables projects
Netfilter related FAQ
Netfilter related HOWTO's
nftables HOWTO
en.tldp.org/LDP/nag2/x-087-2-firewall.html
en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Security-HOWTO.html
en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Firewall-HOWTO.html
www.linuxsecurity.com/docs/
www.little-idiot.de/firewall (German & outdated, but very comprehensive)
linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/03/10/netadmin/ddos.html
staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/ddos
www.e-infomax.com/ipmasq
www.circlemud.org/~jelson/writings/security/index.htm
www.securityfocus.com
www.cert.org - tech_tips
security.ittoolbox.com
www.insecure.org/reading.html
Last updated on 2020-03-05 12:54:16 -0800
The libcap package was installed in LFS, but if Linux-PAM support is desired, the PAM module must be built (after installation of Linux-PAM).
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/security/linux-privs/libcap2/libcap-2.42.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: f22cd619e04ae7b88a6a0c109b9523eb
Download size: 140 KB
Estimated disk space required: 1.3 MB
Estimated build time: less than 0.1 SBU
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/libcap
If you are upgrading libcap from a previous version, use the instructions in LFS libcap page to upgrade libcap. If Linux-PAM-1.4.0 has been built, the PAM module will automatically be built too.
Install libcap by running the following commands:
make -C pam_cap
This package does not come with a test suite.
Now, as the root
user:
install -v -m755 pam_cap/pam_cap.so /lib/security && install -v -m644 pam_cap/capability.conf /etc/security
In order to allow Linux-PAM
to grant privileges based on POSIX capabilites, you need to
add the libcap module to the begining of the /etc/pam.d/system-auth
file. Make the
required edits with the following commands:
mv -v /etc/pam.d/system-auth{,.bak} &&
cat > /etc/pam.d/system-auth << "EOF" &&
# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-auth
auth optional pam_cap.so
EOF
tail -n +3 /etc/pam.d/system-auth.bak >> /etc/pam.d/system-auth
Additonally, you'll need to modify the /etc/security/capability.conf
file to grant
necessary privileges to users, and utilize the setcap utility to set
capabilities on specific utilities as needed. See
man 8 setcap
and man 3
cap_from_text for additional information.
Last updated on 2020-08-17 14:48:50 -0700
The Linux PAM package contains Pluggable Authentication Modules used to enable the local system administrator to choose how applications authenticate users.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/releases/download/v1.4.0/Linux-PAM-1.4.0.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: 39fca0523bccec6af4b63b5322276c84
Download size: 968 KB
Estimated disk space required: 37 MB (with tests)
Estimated build time: 0.3 SBU (with tests)
Optional Documentation
Download (HTTP): https://github.com/linux-pam/linux-pam/releases/download/v1.4.0/Linux-PAM-1.4.0-docs.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: 3440e619ff29074eb977a2ca6e34525a
Download size 468 KB
Berkeley DB-5.3.28, libnsl-1.2.0, libtirpc-1.2.6, libaudit, and Prelude
docbook-xml-4.5, docbook-xsl-1.79.2, fop-2.5, libxslt-1.1.34 and either Lynx-2.8.9rel.1 or W3m
Shadow-4.8.1 needs to be reinstalled after installing and configuring Linux PAM.
With Linux-PAM-1.4.0 and higher, the pam_cracklib module is not installed by default. To enforce strong passwords, it is recommended to use libpwquality-1.4.2.
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/linux-pam
If you downloaded the documentation, unpack the tarball by issuing the following command.
tar -xf ../Linux-PAM-1.4.0-docs.tar.xz --strip-components=1
If you instead want to regenerate the documentation, fix the configure script so that it detects lynx if installed:
sed -e 's/dummy elinks/dummy lynx/' \ -e 's/-no-numbering -no-references/-force-html -nonumbers -stdin/' \ -i configure
Install Linux PAM by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --libdir=/usr/lib \ --enable-securedir=/lib/security \ --docdir=/usr/share/doc/Linux-PAM-1.4.0 && make
To test the results, a suitable /etc/pam.d/other
configuration file must
exist.
If you have a system with Linux PAM installed and working,
be careful when modifying the files in /etc/pam.d
, since your system may become
totally unusable. If you want to run the tests, you do not
need to create another /etc/pam.d/other
file. The installed one
can be used for that purpose.
You should also be aware that make install overwrites
the configuration files in /etc/security
as well as /etc/environment
. In case you have
modified those files, be sure to back them up.
For a first installation, create the configuration file by
issuing the following commands as the root
user:
install -v -m755 -d /etc/pam.d &&
cat > /etc/pam.d/other << "EOF"
auth required pam_deny.so
account required pam_deny.so
password required pam_deny.so
session required pam_deny.so
EOF
Now run the tests by issuing make check. Ensure there are no errors produced by the tests before continuing the installation. Note that the checks are quite long. It may be useful to redirect the output to a log file in order to inspect it thoroughly.
Only in case of a first installation, remove the
configuration file created earlier by issuing the following
command as the root
user:
rm -fv /etc/pam.d/other
Now, as the root
user:
make install && chmod -v 4755 /sbin/unix_chkpwd && for file in pam pam_misc pamc do mv -v /usr/lib/lib${file}.so.* /lib && ln -sfv ../../lib/$(readlink /usr/lib/lib${file}.so) /usr/lib/lib${file}.so done
--enable-securedir=/lib/security
:
This switch sets install location for the PAM modules.
--disable-regenerate-docu
: If
the needed dependencies (docbook-xml-4.5, docbook-xsl-1.79.2, libxslt-1.1.34, and Lynx-2.8.9rel.1 or
W3m)
are installed, the manual pages, and the html and text
documentations are (re)generated and installed. Furthermore,
if fop-2.5 is
installed, the PDF documentation is generated and installed.
Use this switch if you do not want to rebuild the
documentation.
chmod -v 4755
/sbin/unix_chkpwd: The unix_chkpwd helper program
must be setuid so that non-root
processes can access the shadow
file.
Configuration information is placed in /etc/pam.d/
. Below is an example file:
# Begin /etc/pam.d/other
auth required pam_unix.so nullok
account required pam_unix.so
session required pam_unix.so
password required pam_unix.so nullok
# End /etc/pam.d/other
Now set up some generic files. As root:
install -vdm755 /etc/pam.d && cat > /etc/pam.d/system-account << "EOF" &&# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-account account required pam_unix.so # End /etc/pam.d/system-account
EOF cat > /etc/pam.d/system-auth << "EOF" &&# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-auth auth required pam_unix.so # End /etc/pam.d/system-auth
EOF cat > /etc/pam.d/system-session << "EOF"# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-session session required pam_unix.so # End /etc/pam.d/system-session
EOF cat > /etc/pam.d/system-password << "EOF"# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-password # use sha512 hash for encryption, use shadow, and try to use any previously # defined authentication token (chosen password) set by any prior module password required pam_unix.so sha512 shadow try_first_pass # End /etc/pam.d/system-password
EOF
If you wish to enable strong password support, install libpwquality-1.4.2, and follow the instructions in that page to configure the pam_pwquality PAM module with strong password support.
Now add a restrictive /etc/pam.d/other
configuration file. With
this file, programs that are PAM aware will not run unless
a configuration file specifically for that application is
created.
cat > /etc/pam.d/other << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/pam.d/other
auth required pam_warn.so
auth required pam_deny.so
account required pam_warn.so
account required pam_deny.so
password required pam_warn.so
password required pam_deny.so
session required pam_warn.so
session required pam_deny.so
# End /etc/pam.d/other
EOF
The PAM man page (man pam) provides a good starting point for descriptions of fields and allowable entries. The Linux-PAM System Administrators' Guide is recommended for additional information.
You should now reinstall the Shadow-4.8.1 package.
displays and modifies the authentication failure record files. |
|
is a helper binary that creates home directories. |
|
is used to check if the default timestamp is valid |
|
is a helper binary that verifies the password of the current user. |
|
is a helper binary that updates the password of a given user. |
|
provides the interfaces between applications and the PAM modules. |
Last updated on 2020-08-16 21:26:53 -0700
liboauth is a collection of POSIX-C functions implementing the OAuth Core RFC 5849 standard. Liboauth provides functions to escape and encode parameters according to OAuth specification and offers high-level functionality to sign requests or verify OAuth signatures as well as perform HTTP requests.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://downloads.sourceforge.net/liboauth/liboauth-1.0.3.tar.gz
Download MD5 sum: 689b46c2b3ab1a39735ac33f714c4f7f
Download size: 496 KB
Estimated disk space required: 3.5 MB
Estimated build time: less than 0.1 SBU
Required patch for use with openssl: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/patches/blfs/10.0/liboauth-1.0.3-openssl-1.1.0-3.patch
NSS-3.55 and Doxygen-1.8.19 (to build documentation)
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/liboauth
Apply a patch for the current version of openssl:
patch -Np1 -i ../liboauth-1.0.3-openssl-1.1.0-3.patch
Install liboauth by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-static && make
If you wish to build the documentation (needs Doxygen-1.8.19), issue:
make dox
To test the results, issue: make check.
Now, as the root
user:
make install
If you have previously built the documentation, install it by
running the following commands as the root
user:
install -v -dm755 /usr/share/doc/liboauth-1.0.3 && cp -rv doc/html/* /usr/share/doc/liboauth-1.0.3
--disable-static
:
This switch prevents installation of static versions of the
libraries.
--enable-nss
: Use this switch if
you want to use Mozilla NSS instead of OpenSSL.
Last updated on 2020-08-23 15:03:29 -0700
The libpwquality package provides common functions for password quality checking and also scoring them based on their apparent randomness. The library also provides a function for generating random passwords with good pronounceability.
This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.0 platform.
Download (HTTP): https://github.com/libpwquality/libpwquality/releases/download/libpwquality-1.4.2/libpwquality-1.4.2.tar.bz2
Download MD5 sum: ae6e61fc33f5dac0de5e847eb7520d71
Download size: 416 KB
Estimated disk space required: 4.1 MB
Estimated build time: less than 0.1 SBU
User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/libpwquality
Install libpwquality by running the following commands:
./configure --prefix=/usr \ --disable-static \ --with-securedir=/lib/security \ --with-python-binary=python3 && make
This package does not come with a test suite.
Now, as the root
user:
make install && mv -v /usr/lib/libpwquality.so.* /lib && ln -sfv ../../lib/$(readlink /usr/lib/libpwquality.so) /usr/lib/libpwquality.so
--with-python-binary=python3
:
This parameter gives the location of the Python binary. The default is python
, and requires Python-2.7.18.
libpwquality is intended to
be a functional replacement for the now-obsolete pam_cracklib.so
PAM module. To configure
the system to use the pam_pwquality
module, execute the following
commands as the root
user:
mv /etc/pam.d/system-password{,.orig} &&
cat > /etc/pam.d/system-password << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-password
# check new passwords for strength (man pam_pwquality)
password required pam_pwquality.so authtok_type=UNIX retry=1 difok=1 \
minlen=8 dcredit=0 ucredit=0 \
lcredit=0 ocredit=0 minclass=1 \
maxrepeat=0 maxsequence=0 \
maxclassrepeat=0 geoscheck=0 \
dictcheck=1 usercheck=1 \
enforcing=1 badwords="" \
dictpath=/lib/cracklib/pw_dict
# use sha512 hash for encryption, use shadow, and use the
# authentication token (chosen password) set by pam_pwquality
# above (or any previous modules)
password required pam_unix.so sha512 shadow use_authtok
# End /etc/pam.d/system-password
EOF
Last updated on 2015-09-25 08:48:24 -0500