Gentoo Machine, how little can i get away with?

R

RobertMacUser

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 20, 2005
Messages
186
I am new to gentoo and linux in general. i am hoping to purchase an old laptop and use it as a dedicated gentoo machine. i am hoping to spend next to nothing. i have been lead to believe that gentoo can be configured to run on very modest machine. if so, what can i get away with? a p2 laptop? p3?

-Robert
 
Any hardware will do really (provided it is linux compatable). A PII or PIII would be just fine.
I have Gentoo installed on an older Dell laptop with a celeron and 128mb of ram. It took quite some time to get from start to finish, but it runs great.

Understand though, that with Gentoo you are going to be installing a good majority of the entire system from source. So, if we are talking about turning this into a desktop system, you can expect a few days to possibly a week worth of installation time for a DE, office suite, general applications, etc. Of course you don't have to sit through it all, it's basically an enter command, wait for 24 hours, enter command, wait for 12 hours, etc type of experience.

Another good option is Damn Small Linux (DSL).
 
I wouldn't recommend gentoo for an older machine. A binary distribution would probably be less frustrating. You'll still have to do a fair bit of work to get it set up the way you want it, but at least you won't have to spend a few days compiling to get to that point.
 
Gentoo is fine for old machines, as long as you are patient. My friend put it on an old 500mhz machine. took a day or two to compile the initial stuff, but it was eventually up and running. Made a nice machine.


Just remember, good things come to those who wait :)
 
tskiller said:
Gentoo is fine for old machines, as long as you are patient. My friend put it on an old 500mhz machine. took a day or two to compile the initial stuff, but it was eventually up and running. Made a nice machine.


Just remember, good things come to those who wait :)
Click to expand...

A coworker of mine decided to try out Gentoo on my advice, except he tryed on an old P2 box....

Needless to say that put him off permanantly... I tryed telling the next day that he should have told me first then I could have told him to grab a faster machine, but he still to this day wont touch it.

I say it is his own ignorance, but I suppose I could have made it more clear how long it takes.
 
ohh. thanks soo much for the advice!

im going to try a gento install on my sager np5720 now. im using live cd install (i use wireless internet)

-Robert
 
wireless configs can borderline on voodoo -
Or maybe I was just a bonehead and that's why it took me 3 hours to get connected.

Once connected though - the wireless card has ran fine for months. Faster transfer speeds than in windows too... strange.

Have fun.
 
I agree. Good luck with setting up that wireless internet! ;)

Think of it as an adventure! :D
 
I've built gentoo on a pentium 1 233mhz with 64mb of ram. Talk about slow.


Remember, though, that you don't have to build the system on the same computer that you're going to run it on. ;) you can just pop the hard drive into a fast computer, set the compile options and kernel just like you would for the slow box, build all the big packages you want off the live cd, and transfer the hard drive back to the slow box for the first boot.
 
To the OP. If you want to build a gentoo system on the cheap I would just grab like a celeron d or cheap amd cpu and parts and just build a new system. I mean you can get a cpu and motherboard for less then 100, case and ps for like 40/50 bucks new, hd for 50, ram for 100(for a gig). Depending on how many parts you have lying around you could prob make it real cheap. That or just buy a cheap emachine or dell desktop new. I was ordering p4 dells with a gig of ram and a 19 inch lcd for less then 500. Kinda kills the idea of buying a p3 laptop for like 200 or so unless you need it to be portable in my book.
 
You can install Gentoo on pretty much anything. I've put it on an AMD K6-2/400, SGI R4400, Ultra SPARC 1.

Be glad it's all stage 3 now and people won't push you to stage 1. heh!

(I miss stage 1.)
 
I installed Gentoo on my old laptop which was a P3 500 with 128mb or 256mb of ram (can't really remember) and like a 6gb drive. The key to a mean, lean modest machine is running a tiny WM. I personally used XFCE, though *box's (Openbox, Fluxbox) are fantastic too. Note that you get very little (if any) purtyness running a tiny wm, so don't get your hopes up at showing off in front of the OSX kids. KDE/Gnome is just too much for old systems typically. IIRC it took about 1min 10-30seconds to go from pressing the power button to a fully functional desktop on that system, which was really quick considering it took Windows 2000 about 4-5 minutes in total. The only problem of course with something like this is that Gentoo takes for bloody ever to compile anything on all these old systems. If you've got the initial time to burn, I say go for it.
 
doh said:
You can install Gentoo on pretty much anything. I've put it on an AMD K6-2/400, SGI R4400, Ultra SPARC 1.

Be glad it's all stage 3 now and people won't push you to stage 1. heh!

(I miss stage 1.)
Click to expand...


Me too. Once i get my molex converter for my rackmount server im going to reinstall gentoo via stage one if i can find my old gentoo install disk forr last year. otherwise ill just use that newfangled live-cd. Crazy whippersnappers dont know how easy you have it.! :p
 
tskiller said:
Me too. Once i get my molex converter for my rackmount server im going to reinstall gentoo via stage one if i can find my old gentoo install disk forr last year. otherwise ill just use that newfangled live-cd. Crazy whippersnappers dont know how easy you have it.! :p
Click to expand...

They still make the stage1 for the newer profile. There is a problem with perl though, where you have to emerge --oneshot --nodeps perl, then you can /usr/portage/scripts/bootstrap.sh, then you can emerge -e world. then continue on with the stage3 instructions.
 
I've installed it on a Pentium MMX 233MHz laptop. Need a lot of patience in that install, but it works fine once you get it going. I've also installed it on several 400MHz P2 Desktops. You still need patience, but they run it reasonablely well. The main thing to worry about with gentoo is hard drive space and RAM. It can be pretty easy to run out of hard drive space during some of the larger packages. Plus the more RAM you have, the faster your emerges will be.

Whatever you do, don't try it on a laptop with only a 2GB hard drive.
 
I've installed Gentoo on a P2-450 from stage 1. I really didn't need the machine for anything, just wanted to play with it, so I wasn't in any hurry. 'emerge gnome kde openoffice firefox thunderbird' plus a few more big packages took something like 19 days. I don't think I'll be trying that again.

I gotta say, I don't really miss Stage 1. I used to use it on everything. Now I just do a basic stage 3, get everything set up, and reboot into a working system. From there, I can set whatever cflags and stuff I want, and just emerge -eD system && emerge -eD world. It ends up being the same thing, and it's easier for me to deal with.
 
I don't think that a stage 1 install has anything to offer on a home system. Maybe for a server, it'd be ok. Takes more time than it's worth IMO
 
Codegen said:
I don't think that a stage 1 install has anything to offer on a home system. Maybe for a server, it'd be ok. Takes more time than it's worth IMO
Click to expand...
Hence why they got rid of the stage 1 and stage 2 instructions on the handbook.
 
to be honest, i dont think i would want to use gentoo with a production server. (unless i had identical machines with my own local portage server and compile farm so my production units can get pre compiled binaries) there are alot of really nice server OSes out there, my favorite being CentOs. But, gentoo, for me, makes the ultimate hobby box. You build and configure everything the way you want it. i dunno its just fun for me to goof with.
 
tskiller said:
to be honest, i dont think i would want to use gentoo with a production server. (unless i had identical machines with my own local portage server and compile farm so my production units can get pre compiled binaries) there are alot of really nice server OSes out there, my favorite being CentOs. But, gentoo, for me, makes the ultimate hobby box. You build and configure everything the way you want it. i dunno its just fun for me to goof with.
Click to expand...
I agree as well. I know some guys using gentoo for a computer lab at a University. They do exactly what you suggested (one box builds updated binaries, the rest just pull the precompiled packages and use them). If you really need something to be highly customizable, I can see a use for gentoo, but if you just need something to work and nothing fancy, most other distros will be much easier to manage. Where I am currently working (managed server hosting company) it's mostly CentOS, RHEL, and Fedora, if the customer wants something else we can do it but they don't get any OS support from us.
 
Thing is with a production server most companies want support. This is where redhat enterprise comes in. Same reason why a lot of companies use cisco and only cisco. If you follow the netowrking threads here everytime someone asks about a higher end router some idiot comes in and says take an old box and use ipcop or something. With bigger business new well supported devices are where it is at. Gentoo will have a hard time in this enviroment unless you are dealing with a business with a good in house dev/programming team.

Gentoo is great for people wanting to really learn linux and for people who want to tinker.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top