[LFS] Hackathon 001 - A hacker's day out

I attended in Bangladesh's first ever Hackathon on Linux From Scratch today. A whole night inter city travel and we were at the very first phenomenal arrangement of Hacking Linux. Some of the craziest Linux enthusiasts met up at Ankur ICT Development there. Our favorite MAK Bhai (Mahey Alam Khan), Shihan Bhai and new Hacker Robin Mehdee and a bunch of other awesome Linux enthusiasts including my friends Saadi and Ri Ne.

Although we had planned for a whole LFS completion throughout the day, we ultimately ended up only compiling the Linux kernel. Today what we really gained from the meet up are:

1. Ideas about conducting a successful Hackathon (on LFS)
2. Suggestions about what to do on the next Hackathon
3. Ultimate goal of the LFS Hacking project
4. Gained insights on the Linux building method
5. Some great ideas about projects (using LFS) other than building a distro. Some of them are

• Building lightweight OS for POS (Point of sales) systems
• An OS for ATM Booths that doesn't use the extra payload of Windows XP, built entirely from LFS project
• A Library system built on LFS

Shihan bhai talked about taking over the IT sector by pure enthusiastic and passionate IT lovers from unethical administrators. MAK bhai pointed out how robustly developed system can change the outlook of people towards the underrated IT sector of Bangladesh. We also heard some great stories on Hackathons outside the country where people actually focus on the fun of gossiping about geeky and on the spot hacks rather than waste useless time on formalities of events. We all agreed upon how Hackathons should be like. Hackathons should be like a breeding ground of new ideas, hacks, productive usage of the topics under consideration rather than going round and round on the formalities of the events.

We compiled a Linux Kernel from source and talked about problems experienced during compilation. During compilation various issues such as toolchain problems, cyclic execution of the compilation process etc might take place.

Shihan bhai also showed us why the Kernel is actually called the heart of OS. He explained in depth about booting, master boot records, execution of instructions by the OS etc.

The commands used during the compilation of the kernel are: 

Install qemu
  sudo apt-get install qemu
Install Busybox
  sudo apt-get install busybox
Install Clibs: glibs, ulibc
  sudo apt-get install linux-libc-dev libucommon3
Check CPU
  cat /proc/cpuinfo
Download & extract kernel to /usr/src/
  uname -r
Move to linux kernel folder
  sudo nano Makefile
Change EXTRAVERSION to ‘uname -r’ value
  sudo make mrproper
  sudo make mproper
  sudo make oldconfig
  sudo cp /boot/config-3.2.0-23-generic-pae .config
  sudo make prepare
  sudo make allnoconfig
  sudo make menuconfig
  sudo make