two prompts. one shell.
A Linux distribution I built from source, one package at a time, on a 2012 ThinkPad X230. It started as a Linux From Scratch 13.0 (systemd) build and kept going: custom kernel, full X11 and XFCE desktop, NetworkManager, PipeWire, Nix on top for the stuff I don't want to compile, and a small brand around all of it.
It boots, it runs a desktop, it gets on wifi, it plays sound, and I daily-drive it from the laptop it lives on. Everything on the box that isn't a stock upstream file is mirrored in this repo.
Where it stands right now: the project has been paused for a couple of months while I took time for other things, including moving countries. I plan to come back to it soon, with a fresher head and after learning more about Linux and the wider stack, because there is a lot of the system I built without fully understanding yet and I want to close that gap before building further.
About the AI part, because it's the whole point: I built this with AI help. Claude Code did a lot of the repetitive work, downloading, configuring, running the book's steps, while I did the reading, the diagnosis and the decisions. That's not a footnote, it's the idea. The name of the mark, two prompts, one shell, means exactly that: one prompt is mine, one belongs to an AI agent, and they share the same machine. The long-term plan is a system built from the ground up to be run together with an agent, where the agent is a first-class operator of the box rather than a chat window bolted on top. The LFS base is the part where I make sure I understand the machine well enough to hand half of it to something else. The other half of the same idea already exists on my phone: spirit is a Fedora running on top of Android under proot, built for Claude Code to live in, and the-body is the app that lets the agent see and touch the phone.
| Layer | What I built |
|---|---|
| Base | LFS 13.0-systemd, glibc 2.42, GCC 15.2, systemd 259, all built from source with the cross-toolchain, temporary tools, then chroot, exactly as the book lays it out |
| Kernel | Linux 6.18.10, my own config. Rebuilt twice to get audio working: the first rebuild was based on a wrong diagnosis, the second one found the real bug in the kernel source (the story) |
| Network | NetworkManager 1.56 + wpa_supplicant, iwlwifi for the Intel 6205 card, hand-written fallback DNS so the box resolves before NM is up |
| Graphics | Mesa 25.3 (crocus for the Ivy Bridge iGPU), LLVM 21, Xorg 21.1, full xorg libs and fonts |
| Desktop | GTK 3, XFCE 4.20, LightDM with the GTK greeter, Catppuccin Mocha title bars, Papirus icons, a vertical dock I call the Workshop Rail |
| Sound | ALSA + PipeWire 1.6 + WirePlumber, Realtek ALC269VC codec |
| Package layer | Nix 2.34, multi-user, flakes-first. Firefox and Claude Code come from nixpkgs, everything else is compiled here |
| Toolchain | Rust 1.93, Python 3.14, Perl 5.42, cmake, meson, ninja. Around 300 packages in /sources |
| Brand | A palette, a two-cursor mark, Red Hat Mono everywhere, a bero CLI, and a few easter eggs I'm not going to list |
The laptop is the source of truth for running state. The repo is the source of truth for configuration. The rule is simple: configs/ mirrors the target filesystem, so configs/etc/fstab is /etc/fstab on the box, configs/home/bero/.config/xfce4/... is my XFCE state, and so on. After anything changes on the machine it gets copied back here and committed. A fresh rebuild should be able to take this tree and get the same system.
configs/
boot/ kernel .config and grub.cfg
etc/ system config: systemd units, PAM, fonts, profile.d, lightdm, NetworkManager, sshd
home/bero/ user dotfiles and the full xfconf XML snapshot
root/ root's dotfiles from before I moved to a normal user
usr/ the bero CLI, the lightdm session wrapper, themes, brand assets, extra fonts
var/ ALSA state
patches/ patches I had to write when a package wouldn't build clean
build-notes/ one file per thing that was harder than the book made it sound
JOURNAL.md dated log of every session, written as I went
docs/ screenshots and longer write-ups
Wifi profiles never get mirrored. .gitignore blocks the whole system-connections/ directory because those files hold the passphrase in cleartext.
These are the part of the repo I'd actually point someone at. Each one is a problem that cost me real time, what the symptom looked like, what was actually wrong, and the fix. A few worth reading:
- kernel-audio.md: HDA codec drivers built as modules never get loaded when the HDA core is built in, because
request_codec_module()is compiled out under#ifdef MODULE. Kconfig doesn't warn. Two kernel rebuilds to find it. - librsvg-pixbuf-loader.md: librsvg ships with the gdk-pixbuf SVG loader disabled by default, so every SVG icon theme silently fell back to GTK's built-in PNGs for the first two weeks of the project.
- gdk-pixbuf.md: the greeter crashed at first boot because gdk-pixbuf was built without image loaders. Same family of bug, found first.
- networkmanager.md: three failed builds, three different reasons. Undeclared PyGObject dependency, typelib search paths in
/usr/lib64, and xsltproc trying to fetch DocBook XSL over the network. - lightdm.md: BLFS gives you the daemon and the greeter and nothing else. The systemd unit and the session wrapper are hand-written.
- nix.md: installing Nix on a non-NixOS from-source box, and the
profile.dsort-order bug it exposed. - kernel-module-inventory.md: what the 11 modules on the system are, and why a
tainted=4reading doesn't mean out-of-tree modules. - font-glyph-coverage.md, desktop-theming.md, dns-fallback.md, sshd-keygen-guard.md, kitty-altscreen-scrollback.md, and the rest.
JOURNAL.md is the whole thing in order, from the first boot to the last session. It's written the way I'd tell it to a friend, not as documentation. The wrong turns are left in, because the wrong turns are where I learned the most: the audio misdiagnosis, the hour spent rebuilding icon caches when the real problem was a missing loader, the audit finding I pushed back on because its reading of the kernel taint bits was wrong.
I build on the X230 itself, over SSH from my daily driver. Long compiles run in the background while I do other things. Every non-obvious fix gets a build note. Every session gets a journal entry. Nothing is installed without being mirrored back.
Some rules I set for myself early and kept:
-j4, never more, the X230 has four threads.- Read the source before trying kernel parameters. The audio fix came from
bind.c, not from a forum. - Audits and reviews are inputs, not orders. Verify the finding before acting on it.
- The accent colour goes on cursors, markers and one dot per screen. Never as a background.
A self-audit against the BLFS book in late May found the gaps honestly. The big ones, still open:
- The security base is a single-user convenience setup: root can SSH in with a password, there's no firewall because the kernel has no netfilter tables yet, GnuPG is a stub, and the PAM stack is minimal. All known, all planned as one coordinated hardening pass.
- The graphical session isn't registered with logind, because
pam_systemd.sowas never installed into PAM's module directory. Things work through fallbacks. - No FUSE, exFAT or NTFS in the kernel, so removable media is FAT-only. One kernel rebuild fixes it, along with
THINKPAD_ACPIfor the Fn keys. - The dock is a v1. It works, it looks like it's from 2002.
ThinkPad X230. Intel i5-3320M, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SanDisk SSD, 1366x768 panel, Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 wifi, Realtek ALC269VC audio.
The mark is two cursors: one filled, one outlined. Two prompts, one shell. Palette, wordmark and wallpapers live in .brand/ and configs/usr/local/share/bero-os/.
