Now that a file system has been created, the partition needs to be made accessible. In order to do this, the partition needs to be mounted at a chosen mount point. For the purposes of this book, it is assumed that the file system is mounted under /mnt/lfs, but the directory choice is up to you.

Choose a mount point and assign it to the LFS environment variable by running:

export LFS=/mnt/lfs

Next, create the mount point and mount the LFS file system by running:

mkdir -pv $LFS
mount -v -t ext3 /dev/<xxx> $LFS

Replace <xxx> with the designation of the LFS partition.

If using multiple partitions for LFS (e.g., one for / and another for /usr), mount them using:

mkdir -pv $LFS
mount -v -t ext3 /dev/<xxx> $LFS
mkdir -v $LFS/usr
mount -v -t ext3 /dev/<yyy> $LFS/usr

Replace <xxx> and <yyy> with the appropriate partition names.

Ensure that this new partition is not mounted with permissions that are too restrictive (such as the nosuid, nodev, or noatime options). Run the mount command without any parameters to see what options are set for the mounted LFS partition. If nosuid, nodev, and/or noatime are set, the partition will need to be remounted.

If you are using a swap partition, ensure that it is enabled using the swapon command:

/sbin/swapon -v /dev/<zzz>

Replace <zzz> with the name of the swap partition.

Now that there is an established place to work, it is time to download the packages.