For a while now, I’ve been wanting to make an LFS system, but I’ve always seen it as a hard guide to follow. I use Linux, sure, but I’m not that advanced yet, but I wanted to try LFS. Because I see LFS like that, I’ve found a solution, by using a small Debian system. I’ve added commands so you can follow along. The requirements are as follows:

• a Debian/Debian-based system
• a few GBs of disk space
• debootstrap

If you don’t have debootstrap:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install debootstrap

1. Let’s make a root directory for DFS#

Let’s make a directory for DFS. I’ll call mine “dfs” in /mnt.

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/dfs

2. Let’s bootstrap a small Debian System#

Remember we installed debootstrap? Let’s use that to create a small Debian system. I’ll make a Debian 13 system, amd64 and using the Debian repositories:

sudo debootstrap --arch=amd64 trixie /mnt/dfs http://deb.debian.org/debian

3. Let’s chroot into it#

First, we need to mount some essential folders (/dev, /proc, /sys), which our minimal system does not have. Let’s mount those now:

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dfs/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/dfs/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/dfs/sys

Okay, now that we’ve done that, let’s chroot into it:

sudo chroot /mnt/dfs /bin/bash

4. Let’s set some basic configuration#

I’m assuming you want to use this in a container, so I will not be covering fstab. There are a lot of better guides than this one that show you exactly how to set up fstab. Let’s set up the hostname:

echo "mini-debian" > /etc/hostname

apt sources:

cat > /etc/apt/sources.list <<EOF
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie-updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main
EOF

Add a user:

adduser lfs
usermod -aG sudo lfs

5. We’re done!#

You can now exit chroot and use this small Debian system!

Warning! Please do not use this in production. This is more for testing/learning, and you must do much more than this to make it work decently.#