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Date:      Wed, 30 Jan 2002 13:31:47 +0100
From:      Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>
To:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Making the linux world on FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <20020130133146.A61311@lpt.ens.fr>

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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

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