%general-entities; ]> You should be able to build a CLFS system from just about any recent Linux distrubtion. Your host system should have the following software with the minimum versions indicated. Also note that many distributions will place software headers into separate packages, often in the form of [package-name]-devel or [package-name]-dev. Be sure to install those if your distribution provides them. Bash 4.0 Binutils-2.20 Bzip2-1.0.5 Coreutils-8.1 Diffutils-3.0 Findutils-4.4.0 Gawk-3.1 Gcc-4.4 Glibc-2.11 Grep-2.6 Gzip-1.3 Make-3.81 Patch-2.6 Sed-4.2.1 Tar-1.23 To see whether your host system has all the appropriate versions, run the following: cat > version-check.sh << "EOF" #!/bin/bash # Simple script to list version numbers of critical development tools bash --version | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f2-4 echo -n "Binutils: "; ld --version | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f3- bzip2 --version 2>&1 < /dev/null | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f1,6- echo -n "Coreutils: "; chown --version | head -n1 | cut -d")" -f2 diff --version | head -n1 find --version | head -n1 gawk --version | head -n1 gcc --version | head -n1 ldd $(which ${SHELL}) | grep libc.so | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | ${SHELL} | head -n 1 \ | cut -d ' ' -f 1-10 grep --version | head -n1 gzip --version | head -n1 make --version | head -n1 patch --version | head -n1 sed --version | head -n1 tar --version | head -n1 EOF bash version-check.sh