From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Jan 30 4:31:58 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from nef.ens.fr (nef.ens.fr [129.199.96.32]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EF6B537B402 for ; Wed, 30 Jan 2002 04:31:54 -0800 (PST) Received: from corto.lpt.ens.fr (corto.lpt.ens.fr [129.199.122.2]) by nef.ens.fr (8.10.1/1.01.28121999) with ESMTP id g0UCVnl79241 for ; Wed, 30 Jan 2002 13:31:49 +0100 (CET) Received: from (rsidd@localhost) by corto.lpt.ens.fr (8.9.3/jtpda-5.3.1) id NAA61807 for chat@freebsd.org; Wed, 30 Jan 2002 13:31:47 +0100 (CET) Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 13:31:47 +0100 From: Rahul Siddharthan To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Making the linux world on FreeBSD Message-ID: <20020130133146.A61311@lpt.ens.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE i386 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org How good is FreeBSD's linuxulator? This is how good it is. I was curious to try out Gentoo Linux (http://www.gentoo.org), but their normal install requires burning an ISO image and I don't have a burner. So I decided to use their build image tarball and further instructions. I cleared out one partition on my FreeBSD machine, and changed the partition id to linux. Under FreeBSD, I used linux's mke2fs to format the partition. I extracted a "build image" of gentoo available on their website. I chrooted to the linux partition and executed their command to rebuild the base utilities (glibc, gcc, binutils); there were some hiccups with glibc but I got over them. I executed the command to rebuild the remaining base packages. It built flawlessly, except, for some reason, the spython package. Finally, I built the linux kernel, configured grub (installed in freebsd), and rebooted. And the machine booted into linux. Well, it hung before booting fully, but after I built and installed a very stripped-down linux kernel, it booted all the way. Perhaps a full-featured linux kernel has problems with my machine. There were several other small things I needed to do while building -- a freebsd-compatible /dev/null, linking /proc to freebsd's linprocfs, etc. But basically, FreeBSD's linuxulator can be used to build the linux kernel and the entire base system of a linux distribution. I'm darn impressed. - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message