Because I've got nothing better to do this week (other than a soccer match on Wednesday evening and a meetup on Friday), I decided to try to do Linux from the ground up on one of my old Dell lappys.

Has anyone got a suggestion of a small CD-based install that will basically give me a booting CLI with gcc, nothing more required? I can't get down more than 200MB in one file (fscking insane proxy....) but at least I can get that 200 MB pretty fast....

Linux from scratch

LOL

If you are a linux newbie. just download fedora core, or mandrake and install that. Don't try to do anything fancy, like one of these "make your own" installs, or anything. That will be too hard. Installing fedora core or mandrake will be easy, especially if its on a machine as a single OS - no dual boot. You should be up and running in no time with that. And you've no important data on that machine to loose. You will be cool. Stop stressing and start installing, there's really no time like the present.

Yes but something like Linux from scratch is a good way to understand the innards of Linux.

Err, I'm not a Linux newbie. If I was, I'd just use Lycoris, not try building from the ground up.

I also have *far* too much experience configuring dual/triple/quad boots at this stage.

I just couldn't be arsed trying to faff around building the kernel/c library/bash/gcc under something like Cygwin and making my own boot CD, etc.

I'll take a look into LFS, although it does seem to rely on you having a Linux system to build the stuff on first, hence defeating the purpose, really.

I'm also not sure what DigitAlex finds so funny.

OK, you didn't really make it clear that you weren't a beginner.

And even if you were, I still don't think any "do it yourself" Linuxes are a useful learning experience for a newbie anyway. Getting an easy to install Linux on their machine and starting to learn the command line IS.

But this doesn't apply to you, since you say your not new to it. I don't think you made that clear enough in your initial post.

The problem with "easy-to-install" distributions is they're so easy that users don't want to learn the command line. Everything is built "Windows-like", so to speak, and then users think, if I don't need CLI in Windows, why would I need it in Linux?

LFS has a bootable CD version, Bootable CD using Linux 2.6.5, nptl and udev, but it is 240 MB. Maybe you can get it with a download manager.

Yes but any newbie that then tries to use Linux to do anything will soon learn that the command line is very much where everything is still happening. I doubt that there impression otherwise would last long....

I think I know the command line well enough by now.....