[ILUG] Linux From Scratch, part II

[John Gay]

After my initial efforts and the generally great learning experience I am 
itching to start it all over again. I've had a generous offer to burn CD's 
and have been busy searching through the BLFS doc to get the library and 
other dependancies right.

Even though I am planning to build only KDE3.1, once it's stable, I am 
finding that I still need most of the Gnome libs, to cover all bases. So far 
I've got 5 pages on 3 sheets of source packages to fetch, and I haven't even 
checked the Web yet.

I've still a few basic problems/questions that I don't fully understand, 
though.

A few packages depend on db-4.0.14. However, there is also gdbm as well as 
MySQL and other databases. Are these compatable? Can I satisfy a requirement 
for db-4.0.14 by installing gdbm instead or can I have several of them 
installed at once?

I'm also finding that their are TWO different sets of Gnome libs and tools, 
and they are in a multitude of seperate source packages. At least KDE puts 
most of it's tools into kde-libs and kde-base. There seems to be at least 10 
different packages needed to support ANY Gnome package at all. Does anyone 
have any experience in maintaining the two levels of Gnome libs? Can I 
install both of them and expect them to play nicely? I have considered just 
dropping anything that depended on Gnome libs, for simplicity, but that would 
include too many really useful things, like XMMS, SDL, XFCE and, I'm sure 
others.

Otherwise, I'm really enjoying getting my hands dirty and building Linux 
boxes from scratch! It's a great learning experience and gives me a real 
sense of control and accomplishment. Debian has a great update/upgrade tools 
and is easy to keep up-to-date, but Debian's idea of up-to-date seems to be 
about 6-9 months behind everyone else.

Cheers,

	John Gay