Foreword Having helped out with LinuxFromScratch for a short time, I noticed that we were getting many queries as to how to do things beyond the base LFS system. At the time, the only assistance specifically offered relating to LFS were the LFS hints (&hints-root;). Most of the LFS hints are extremely good and well written but I (and others) could still see a need for more comprehensive help to go Beyond LFS - hence BLFS. BLFS aims to be more than the LFS-hints converted to XML although much of our work is based around the hints and indeed some authors write both hints and the relevant BLFS sections. We hope that we can provide you with enough information to not only manage to build your system up to what you want, whether it be a web server or a multimedia desktop system, but also that you will learn a lot about system configuration as you go. Thanks as ever go to everyone in the LFS/BLFS community especially those who have contributed instructions, written text, answered questions and generally shouted when things were wrong! Finally, we encourage you to become involved in the community; ask questions on the mailing list or news gateway and join in the fun on #lfs at irc.linuxfromscratch.org. You can find more details about all of these in the section of the book. Enjoy using BLFS. Mark Hymers <markh@linuxfromscratch.org> BLFS Editor (July 2001 - March 2003)