<story><title>Major Proposed Changes to Linux From Scratch</title><url>http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/2020-June/073815.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>core-questions</author><text>Yeah, the basic use case of simple wired network connectivity has gotten extremely complicated, especially in Ubuntu 18+, where you configure Netplan with YAML to render templates or...something.. that configures NetworkManager or not NetworkManager to do whatever to finally run `ip` to set the address.&lt;p&gt;I miss just editing &amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;network&amp;#x2F;interfaces and &amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;resolv.conf by hand. I get that that sucks for laptops, but why can&amp;#x27;t the rest of us just have an exceedingly simple and pleasant setup?</text></item><item><author>Bnshsysjab</author><text>Yeah but that doesn’t teach much about core components in real systems, such as systemd, the init process, how dependencies work etc.&lt;p&gt;I’m not saying you won’t learn, but I learnt a heap by avoiding systemd using gentoo. I eventually gave in when it became clear that it was no longer a viable option for various reasons, but the knowledge I learnt was mostly relevant.&lt;p&gt;That being said, every time I try and do something remotely advanced with network manager I fail. I can no longer have static ips, or customise DNS on a DHCP controlled connection without google</text></item><item><author>MuffinFlavored</author><text>i feel like linux from scratch is kind of overkill&lt;p&gt;1. format a disk a bootable active partition with ext4&lt;p&gt;1. download the kernel, make defconfig &amp;amp;&amp;amp; make&lt;p&gt;1. copy the kernel to the partition with syslinux mbr.bin and probably extlinux.conf (probably copy modules too)&lt;p&gt;1. copy busybox over&lt;p&gt;1. voila</text></item><item><author>darren0</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t recommend Linux From Scratch enough. If you want to understand the composition of the Linux user space, this is one of the best exercises to follow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway8941</author><text>My current cross-distribution method of choice is systemd-networkd. It supports a lot of configuration options and can set up VPN tunnels (like WireGuard).&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;Systemd-networkd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wiki.archlinux.org&amp;#x2F;index.php&amp;#x2F;Systemd-networkd&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a sample config file from my home desktop using a static IP:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  $ cat &amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;systemd&amp;#x2F;network&amp;#x2F;lan.network

  [Match]
  Name=enp3s0
  
  [Network]
  Address=192.168.100.200&amp;#x2F;24
  Gateway=192.168.100.1
  DNS=1.1.1.1
  DNS=1.0.0.1
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This&amp;#x27;ll work on any systemd distribution.&lt;p&gt;netplan is one of those Canonical projects that&amp;#x27;ll probably disappear in a year or two.</text></comment>
<story><title>Major Proposed Changes to Linux From Scratch</title><url>http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/2020-June/073815.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>core-questions</author><text>Yeah, the basic use case of simple wired network connectivity has gotten extremely complicated, especially in Ubuntu 18+, where you configure Netplan with YAML to render templates or...something.. that configures NetworkManager or not NetworkManager to do whatever to finally run `ip` to set the address.&lt;p&gt;I miss just editing &amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;network&amp;#x2F;interfaces and &amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;resolv.conf by hand. I get that that sucks for laptops, but why can&amp;#x27;t the rest of us just have an exceedingly simple and pleasant setup?</text></item><item><author>Bnshsysjab</author><text>Yeah but that doesn’t teach much about core components in real systems, such as systemd, the init process, how dependencies work etc.&lt;p&gt;I’m not saying you won’t learn, but I learnt a heap by avoiding systemd using gentoo. I eventually gave in when it became clear that it was no longer a viable option for various reasons, but the knowledge I learnt was mostly relevant.&lt;p&gt;That being said, every time I try and do something remotely advanced with network manager I fail. I can no longer have static ips, or customise DNS on a DHCP controlled connection without google</text></item><item><author>MuffinFlavored</author><text>i feel like linux from scratch is kind of overkill&lt;p&gt;1. format a disk a bootable active partition with ext4&lt;p&gt;1. download the kernel, make defconfig &amp;amp;&amp;amp; make&lt;p&gt;1. copy the kernel to the partition with syslinux mbr.bin and probably extlinux.conf (probably copy modules too)&lt;p&gt;1. copy busybox over&lt;p&gt;1. voila</text></item><item><author>darren0</author><text>I can&amp;#x27;t recommend Linux From Scratch enough. If you want to understand the composition of the Linux user space, this is one of the best exercises to follow.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akersten</author><text>Ugh, this resonates with me so much. I recently tried to fix some kind of mundane network issue (had a Fedora machine configured for a static IP and wanted to use DHCP instead), and the absolute mess of tooling that is the Linux networking landscape baffled me. How could it get this bad? As far as I could tell, there were at least 4 competing ecosystems (NetworkManager, the &amp;#x27;ip&amp;#x27; tool, &amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;network&amp;#x2F;interfaces, &amp;#x2F;etc&amp;#x2F;sysconfig&amp;#x2F;network-scripts) all extant at the same time.&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;#x27;ip&amp;#x27; tool update one of those files? How do I tell systemd to re-load the configuration? Is NetworkManager running or not? Does it matter? Does NM update these files, or do something magical to the interface? Are these even the right files? The best answer at which I could arrive is &amp;quot;who knows?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Every time I attempted to change the network interface settings, it only stuck around until the machine rebooted. &lt;i&gt;Something&lt;/i&gt; was resetting it back to a static IP, and I had no tools to tell me what.&lt;p&gt;Why did distro maintainers ever allow things to become this confusing? Why do we have so many tools and config files for &lt;i&gt;the same thing&lt;/i&gt;?&lt;p&gt;In the end I reinstalled a fresh copy of Fedora on the machine and set the DHCP configuration in the setup wizard. It&amp;#x27;s that bad.&lt;p&gt;My experience tells me to anticipate a comment along the lines of &amp;quot;Hey, those programs and config files are all actually the same tool, and you must have just been configuring it wrong.&amp;quot; If that&amp;#x27;s the case - it&amp;#x27;s an even stronger point that this chaos has reached a critical mass, where parts of the same networking configuration tool are so disjoint that they don&amp;#x27;t visibly interoperate at all.</text></comment>