I found that out today… … putting a new deck on the slasher… all day drilling steel and fitting roofing bolts. My legs wore out.
I am starting to think the same about Alpine… and Netbsd is not far behind in that race.
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That is really the only thing one gains from LFS.
Building BSD from scratch would be easier and have the same learning benefits.
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I don’t have Ethernet ports and I don’t want to waste money and wait for one to arrive!
All I can suggest is to use your host and chroot or a live usb and mount your lfs partition and chroot!!!
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You do know that Alpine is migrating to a usr-merge system!!!
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Did not know. It does not make much difference because they provide symlinks.1
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I migrated my Alpine VM today!!! /usr is now the default install directory, just like LFS!!!
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The only usable Alpine I have is a VM in virt-manager. My hard install is stuck on the Thunar issue, and will have to be scrapped. In qemu at CLI. it works in Void, but not in Netbsd. … but then neither does any distro work in qemu in Netbsd… some problem with the way netbsd/qemu supports apic.?
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Sadly done that and network in chroot does not work, so I cd mnt/lfs and wget from host.
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Did it work?
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Got Linux-Pam installed and Shadow rebuillt and Sudo installed!!! I now have my user account “ daniel “ up and running, almost ready for xorg!!!
My LFS login now has “ Welcome to LFS 12.4, Kernel: 6.16.1, Architecture: x86_64,
Date: Mon Oct 6 2025 and lfs-12-4 login after I have used the “ nano /etc/issue “ command to edit!!
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Yes, but it’s very slow and keeps crashing. I can’t work like this. The network also does not work after removing NetworkManager and ip command. dhcpcd also fails.
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You have to configure dhcpcd and Wifi. They are not dropin solutions.
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If you did not mount the proper files for $LFS, then you are working in /root of your host!!! If you have a router and a spare ethernet port, you really need to invest in a usb to ethernet adapter, and use the host grub to boot LFS!!! I do not own a tablet, so I really am in the dark!!!
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Unless LFS is booting on it’s own disk, that would have very little impact!!! That is why I am using Gentoo’s grub to boot LFS, and use W11 and ssh to build LFS!!! On my Acer Mini!!!
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I understand things dont work in a chroot. Yes, you need to get LFS booting first, before trying any installs.
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Getting LFS to booting and installing packages, is not for the faint-of-heart, especially on a tablet with a tiny screen and with only one disk!!!
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I did configure them.
I mounted them, and chrhooted into $LFS. And I’m using Grub.
I think the error is on the systemd process list, my WiFi device is showing up as activating, but then 1min30s is over and it gets cancelled. It’s trying to mount something in /sys/subsystem.
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According to copilot this may be your likely causes:
Missing firmware or kernel module: The WiFi device might be recognized but not fully initialized due to missing firmware blobs or driver modules.
systemd timeout: The 90s timeout suggests systemd-networkd or systemd-udevd is waiting for a device that never fully activates.
Mounting /sys/subsystem: That’s likely a udev or systemd attempt to probe device attributes, but failing due to incomplete driver stack.
No DHCP fallback: If the interface is up but not getting an IP, systemd might mark it as failed.
Diagnostic Steps
dmesg | grep -i firmware
dmesg | grep -i wlan
List detected devices:
ip link
lspci -nnk | grep -A3 -i network
lsusb
Check systemd logs:
journalctl -b -u systemd-networkd
journalctl -b -u systemd-udevd
Fix Strategies
Install firmware manually: If it’s a common chipset (e.g., Intel, Realtek, Broadcom), grab the firmware blob from kernel.org or the vendor site. Place it in /lib/firmware.
Use a USB WiFi dongle with known kernel support: Some chipsets (like Atheros AR9271 or Ralink RT5370) work out-of-the-box with upstream drivers and no proprietary firmware.
Temporarily disable systemd-networkd and use wpa_supplicant+dhclient manually:
ip link set wlan0 up
wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B
dhclient wlan0
Mount /sys manually if needed:
mount -t sysfs sysfs /sys
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But systemd-networkd is disabled, that’s funny. And now ip isn’t found. But I noticed that there is an Ethernet port showing up, but can’t fond it physically.
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