Testing the system

After you've completed this section, we can test the system by rebooting into LFS and see if we can log on to it. When you reboot and are at the LILO prompt, enter the label you have entered in the lilo.conf file to start the LFS system. Then enter root's password and you should be on the bash-prompt now. You won't be able to shutdown the system with a program like shutdown. Although the program is present, it will give you the following error: "You don't exist. Go away." when you try to use the program. The meaning of this error is that the system isn't able to locate the password file. Although the shutdown program is statically linked against the libraries it needs, it still depends on the NSS Library (Name Server Switch) which is part of the GNU C Library, which will be installed in a later chapter. This NSS library passes on information where (in this case) the passwd file can be found.

For now you can reboot the system using the reboot -f command. This will bypass shutting down the system using the shutdown program and reboot immediately. Since the file system is mounted read-only this will not harm our system in any way (though you might get a warning next time you try to mount the system that it wasn't unmounted cleanly the last time and that you should run e2fsck to make sure the file system is still intact).