Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Let's face it, when done poorly, learning can be very dull indeed. My uninspired flashcard approach had been slowing my progress and, last month, brought it to a grinding halt. Hence my missing article from FCM#70. As it happens, this in itself is quite ironic; I initially decided to write monthly articles to act as a check, to discipline myself to cover material in order to be able to report on it. Needless to say, it failed, but at the same time it forced me to rethink my approach to learning, and the tentative solution came in the form of 'Linux from Scratch'.
Prowess
To cover it briefly, as the name suggests, Linux from Scratch (LFS) is a guide to building your own linux distribution from the ground up. What I've realised is that sexy is motivating (yes engineering an operating system is sexy). As the adage goes: “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Before you can build your LFS operating system, you must partition off about 10-15GB.* This task brought about a great deal of LPIC-relevant learning (Linux Professional Institute Certification). I learned how to use the fdisk and parted commands and to interpret their outputs. Output interpretation requires a basic understanding of file systems. This partition-task focussed my reading, and here LPIC-relevant texts are valuable. They give plenty of background information and clearly explain the command and its options. There's a second salient point here. Within the confines of my everyday Ubuntu-ing (reading email, playing chess, internet, FCM, watching films), I would never come to partition a hard drive. It just wouldn't enter my horizon, and arbitrarily exploring partitioning seems abstract and contrived. On the other hand, when I successfully partition my hard drive for my own operating system, I gain a sense of achievement. In short, LPIC is designed to train up System Admins: it's a professional qualification. Until command-line LPIC training materials exist, making use of LFS to learn about partitioning and filesystems is a pragmatic option.
*I haven't successfully created the partition yet. When I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, I created one huge ext4 partition (110GB), and one swap partition (10GB). I never thought I'd need to partition further. Another lesson learned.