Free from software for linux

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with the steps necessary to build your own custom Linux system.
There are a lot of reasons why somebody would want to install an LFS system. The question most people raise is "why go through all the hassle of manually installing a Linux system from scratch when you can just download an existing distribution?". That is a valid question which I hope to answer for you.
The most important reason for LFSs existence is teaching people how a Linux system works internally. Building an LFS system teaches you about all that makes Linux tick, how things work together, and depend on each other. And most importantly, how to customize it to your own taste and needs.
One of the key benefits of LFS is that you are in control over your system without having to rely on somebody elses Linux implementation. You are in the drivers seat now and are able to dictate every single thing such as the directory layout and boot script setup. You will also know exactly where, why and how programs are installed.
Another benefit of LFS is that you can create a very compact Linux system. When you install a regular distribution, you end up installing a lot of programs you probably would never use. Theyre just sitting there taking up (precious) disk space. Its not hard to get an LFS system installed under 100 MB. Does that still sound like a lot? A few of us have been working on creating a very small embedded LFS system. We installed a system that was just enough to run the Apache web server; total disk space usage was aproximately 8 MB. With further stripping, that can be brought down to 5 MB or less. Try that with a regular distribution.
If we were to compare a Linux distribution with a hamburger you buy at a supermarket or fast-food restaurant, you would end up eating it without knowing precisely what it is you are eating, whereas LFS gives you the ingredients to make a hamburger. This allows you to carefully inspect it, remove unwanted ingredients, and at the same time allow you to add ingredients to enhance the flavour of your hamburger. When you are satisfied with the ingredients, you go on to the next part of putting it together. You now have the chance to make it just the way you like it: broil it, bake it, deep-fry it, barbeque it, or eat it raw.
Another analogy that we can use is that of comparing LFS with a finished house. LFS will give you the skeleton of a house, but its up to you to install plumbing, electrical outlets, kitchen, bathtub, wallpaper, etc.
Another advantage of a custom built Linux system is added security. You will compile the entire system from source, thus allowing you to audit everything, if you wish to do so, and apply all the security patches you want or need to apply. You dont have to wait for somebody else to provide a new binary package that fixes a security hole. Besides, you have no guarantee that the new package actually fixes the problem (adequately). You never truly know whether a security hole is fixed or not unless you do it yourself.
Enhancements:
- The LFS LiveCD Team is proud to announce the release of the x86-6.2-3 version of LFS LiveCD. This version is built using LFS 6.2 and many Beyond Linux From Scratch packages from the Subversion branch. Source packages for LFS 6.2, and the LFS book itself, are included on the live CD. The CD is also suitable as a host for building x86 and x86_64 Cross LFS systems. Other features and bugfixes: the CD supports hibernation; the CD file system can be written to; the CD contains a visually pleasing and easy-to-use window manager, XFce...

Plan 9 From User Space is a port of the bulk of the Plan 9 software build environment to Unix.
While the libraries make an attempt to play nice with the rest of the system (by using the Unix rules for printf verbs and Unix system headers, for example), this port tries to reproduce the Plan 9 build environment as faithfully as possible, providing u.h and libc.h, and blithely redefining tokens such as open, dup, and accept in order to provide implementations that better mimic the Plan 9 semantics.
The result is a more complicated and less Unix-friendly environment, but Plan 9 programs can typically be compiled with little or no changes.
Most obviously, plan9port derives from Plan 9 from Bell Labs and would not exist without the work of the Plan 9 team over the past many years.
Rob Pike suggested the original X11 port of libdraw years ago, as part of drawterm, and strongly encouraged the Mac OS X work. He has also been a consistent source of good ideas to hide the ugliness of modern Unix.
William Josephson handled troff(1) (with Taj Khattra) and many of the supporting programs. He also inspired the thread library clean-up and has ported a handful of applications.
Andrey Mirtchovski and Axel Belinfante have done significant work dealing with X11 corner cases and fine-tuning rio(1). Axel never tires of finding bugs in the SunOS port.
Latchesar Ionkov has contributed many fixes to tricky bugs, and got factotum(4) up and running.
Many other people have provided help, ported programs, written bug reports, sent useful patches, and gotten plan9port running on new systems.
Bigelow & Holmes, Inc. created the screen fonts in the luc, lucm, lucsans, and pelm directories and granted permission to redistribute them with plan9port.
Enhancements:
- A FUSE-related bug was fixed. See http://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2006-July/048531.html

Automated Linux From Scratch (ALFS) is a project that creates the generic framework for an extendable system builder and package installer.

Why would I want to use ALFS?

After having gone through the LFS and BLFS books more than 2 or 3 times, you will quickly appreciate the ability to automate the task of compiling the software you want for your systems.

What can I do with ALFS?

The goal of ALFS is to automate the process of creating an LFS system. It seeks to make the process of building LFS easier and more efficient while still providing flexibility by granting the user total control and insight into the compilation and management of his LFS build.

How is ALFS implemented?

nALFS

The first ALFS implementation was nALFS by Neven Has. nALFS is a small program written in C. It first parses an XML profile that contains information concerning the LFS build process into a series of internal commands. It can then execute these at your discretion, thus automating the compilation of LFS.

jhalfs

Currently, the official implementation is jhalfs. Originally created by Jeremy Huntwork, but since developed and maintained by Manuel Canales Esparcia and George Boudreau, jhalfs has become a light-weight, practical method of automating an LFS build. jhalfs is a Bash shell script that makes use of Subversion and xsltproc to first download the XML sources of the Linux From Scratch book and then extract any necessary commands, placing them into executable shell scripts. If you do not already have the necessary source packages in place on your system jhalfs can fetch them. Finally, jhalfs generates a Makefile which will control the execution of the shell scripts, allowing for recovery if the build should encounter an error. Since jhalfs extracts its commands to run directly from the LFS book, there are no profiles to edit or maintain.

Note: The 2.2 version of jhalfs has been released. A tarball can been downloaded from http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/alfs/downloads/jhalfs/stable/.

alfs

There are many in-depth features that have been requested for future ALFS implementations. Because of this, development has been slated for an entirely new build tool which will be called alfs. To see a list of features that will appear in alfs, please read our Software Requirements Specification. If you wish to help develop this new tool, please subscribe to the alfs-discuss mailing list and leave a note there explaining your desire to help.

TAO project is a standards-compliant, real-time implementation of CORBA that provides efficient, predictable, and scalable quality of service (QoS) end-to-end.

Unlike conventional implementations of CORBA, which are inefficient, unpredictable, non-scalable, and often non-portable, TAO applies the best software practices and patterns to automate the delivery of high-performance and real-time QoS to distributed applications.

Over the past decade, my research group has worked with many collaborators on large-scale distributed application R&D projects in diverse domains, including command and control systems, telecom, datacom, medical engineering, distributed interactive simulations, and financial services. Regardless of the domain and application requirements, weve found that software developers wrestle with the same core infrastructure challenges. Key challenges focus on OS platform portability, connection management and service initialization, event demultiplexing and event handler dispatching, multi-threading and synchronization, fault detection and fault tolerance, and various quality-of-service (QoS) issues, such as controlling latency, throughput, and jitter end-to-end.

Unfortunately, its very costly, time consuming, and error-prone for researchers and developers companies to independently rediscover and reinvent ad hoc solutions to these core distributed application software development challenges. Fortunately, we have identified a relatively concise set of patterns and framework components that can be applied systematically to eliminate many tedious, error-prone, and non-portable aspects of developing and maintaining distributed applications.

A decade of intense R&D on these topics has yielded ACE, which is an object-oriented framework that implements many core patterns for concurrent communication software. We have applied the patterns and components in the ACE framework to develop The ACE ORB (TAO), which is our standards-based, CORBA middleware framework that allows clients to invoke operations on distributed objects without concern for object location, programming language, OS platform, communication protocols and interconnects, and hardware. TAO is designed using the best software practices and patterns that we have discovered in our work on ACE in order to automate the delivery of high-performance and real-time QoS to distributed applications.

fortune-fgump project consists of some quotes from the movie Forrest Gump.

This collection of quotes is for use with the fortune program.