Ubuntu?

[Petrus]

> decided to use, it's up to me to fix the problem if I want to keep
> him as a customer.  Telling him it's a problem with his distro
> will guarantee he will go away.

I wasn't necessarily advocating simple buck passing; but the bottom line is 
that anything that wants to define itself as either a Linux or UNIX system 
should comply with certain old, very well established conventions, which 
generally speaking exist for extremely sound reasons.  Given how particular 
I know the LFS people are with regards to putting together a system which 
complies with said conventions, if Ubuntu is having problems with ALFS, then 
to me it's a very safe bet that it's due to Ubuntu violating said 
conventions.  The Debian people have more or less gone off and done their 
own thing largely from scratch, from everything I've ever seen.  That 
includes violation of the Single UNIX Specification in some cases, with 
regards to which specific utilities should initially be present on a UNIX 
system.  A core toolchain is not installed by default on a Ubuntu or Debian 
system, and gawk in particular wasn't either, with my recent Ubuntu install.

That's ok and is their right, but for me anyway it is entirely unacceptable. 
It doesn't meet my own definition of a Linux system, (or a more universal 
one if we're talking about UNIX in a broader sense) and it isn't something 
I'm going to use...and if you want certainty that all the development tools 
that should be on a system (in terms of things which allow a system to 
propogate itself from source) are there from the initial install, and that 
everything else is where it should be and works in a consistent, predictable 
way, then you probably shouldn't either.

LFS ensures this.  Slackware ensures this.  Very few other prebuilt 
(especially binary) distributions that I know of do.  Red Hat and Debian 
most certainly do not.

I'm unsure why you'd need to use Ubuntu as an ALFS host anywayz...Surely you 
already have a sane ALFS host, given that you've presumably already done a 
manual build of LFS? ;-)