If you have a problem while using this book, you'll find that most of the people on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and the mailing lists will be willing to help you. You can find a list of the LFS mailing lists in . To assist us in helping though, you should make sure that you have as much relevant information as you can available. This will assist in diagnosing and solving your problem. This part of the book will guide you as to which sort of information will be useful. First of all we need a brief explanation of the problem. Essential things to include are: The version of the book you are using, which is &version; Which package or section you are having problems with What the exact error message or symptom you are receiving is If you have deviated from the book at all Note that saying that you've deviated from the book doesn't mean that we won't help you, after all, LFS is all about choice. It'll just help us to see the possible other causes of your problem. When something goes wrong during the stage where the configure script is run, look at the last lines of the config.log. This file contains possible errors encountered during configure which aren't always printed to the screen. Include those relevant lines if you decide to ask for help. To help us find the cause of the problem, both screen output and the contents of various files are useful. The screen output from both the ./configure script and when make is run can be useful. Don't blindly include the whole thing but on the other hand, don't include too little. As an example, here is some screen output from make: gcc -DALIASPATH=\"/mnt/lfs/usr/share/locale:.\" -DLOCALEDIR=\"/mnt/lfs/usr/share/locale\" -DLIBDIR=\"/mnt/lfs/usr/lib\" -DINCLUDEDIR=\"/mnt/lfs/usr/include\" -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -g -O2 -c getopt1.c gcc -g -O2 -static -o make ar.o arscan.o commands.o dir.o expand.o file.o function.o getopt.o implicit.o job.o main.o misc.o read.o remake.o rule.o signame.o variable.o vpath.o default.o remote-stub.o version.o opt1.o -lutil job.o: In function `load_too_high': /lfs/tmp/make-3.79.1/job.c:1565: undefined reference to `getloadavg' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [make] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/lfs/tmp/make-3.79.1' make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/lfs/tmp/make-3.79.1' make: *** [all-recursive-am] Error 2 In this case, many people just include the bottom section where it says make [2]: *** [make] Error 1 and onwards. This isn't enough for us to diagnose the problem because it only tells us that something went wrong, not what went wrong. The whole section as quoted above is what should be included to be helpful, because it includes the command that was executed and the command's error message(s).