is Gentoo my answer ??

H

hellomcfly

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 2, 2003
Messages
457
well after trying redhat and mandrake i have learned nuthing and dont want to bother with that crap anymore ,,

so here is the situation .

i want to setup a smooth working linux distro on my old computer
- pentium 2 - 266mhz - 64mb of ram - 6gig hd (maybe upgraded to 15gig)

computer will be used for internet - IM - email - mp3 - and everything else computers are used for except hardcore 3d games and photo software. and then setup to host a teamspeak server once all is setup.

so i know Gentoo would take along long time for me to setup. but would it run fairly decent ?? also is it possible for me to do the install on my computer in my sig and then swap the hd ?

i am a true linux newb so the install would be somewhat challenging because i really know little to nuthing

so does Gentoo sound like a plan ? or would you recommend something else

i have tryed
- redhat
- mandrake
- i attempted to install SuSE - but it just would not work
- got afew knoppix live cd's (are pretty cool)

thanks !
 
Gentoo is a major pain in the ass to install.. But once you get it up and running it is really nice. It comes with detailed instructions on how to install it and everything.. so if you're patient enough it'd be good to use.
 
its not really a pain, the x86 install guide is very very good, you should have no problems with that. Just follow what they say to you and you will have an up and running box. But it will take many hours to compile everything, especially if you plan on getting kde/gnome too. Just be prepared for that.
Any other questions ask back.:) happy to see another gentoo user
 
Would recommend slack, debian, gentoo or a BSD. Just make sure you are running a console. Anything more and the gui will suck that machine dry.
 
i was going to say he should try not running x at all, but notice how he said he was a linux n00b coming from mandrake, i dont think he is ready for a 0 gui system yet...
 
Originally posted by cloaked
i was going to say he should try not running x at all, but notice how he said he was a linux n00b coming from mandrake, i dont think he is ready for a 0 gui system yet...
Click to expand...

Understand but that would turn him off especially at that speed. If he can handle it then go for it but I know a lot of modern distros wont even install on that.
 
i would then recommend using a very light wm, definatly not kde or gnome. Even fluxbox would probably be too much. twm?
 
well man, that comp is just a we bit slower than what i had for longest time running gentoo. i had a 300MHz p2, 66mhz bus, 8GB hard drive - but here's the important part - i had 160MBs RAM. your 64 is gonna be, uh, cutting it close. if you wish to use the X window system, i strongly encourage you check out kdrive (the freedesktop.org server instead of xfree86.org's server). coming from a user of similar hardware, i'll testify you'll be happier with it. something light like Openbox, Blackbox, Fluxbox all worked fine. xfce4 was sluggish. gnome? kde? haha yeah right.
as for compiling. i'd say compile it on the barton. as a noob i'd go for the stage3 install, however, i personally can't notice a difference from stage1 and stage3 (tried both on teh comp in my sig - running stage3). what you'll need to do is compile support for both your barton system and the p2. as long as it boots, that's about all you care about for the first time. make sure to set your compile flags to something which will run on your p2, i'd say something like this:
CFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -Os" (that's an o as in orange not a zero. normally i'd do -O2 but with this older hardware, it really hates larger programs)

so how the install works: you'll want an i686 stage3 tarball from any gentoo mirror (or better yet, the entire livecd)
pull your windows hard drives, and replace them with the p2 one.
install to the drive as if nothing special or different is about it.
certain packages will fail: gcc, mplayer, binutils, those are the ones which come to mind. basically those few packages which disregard your compile flags and instead auto-detect your system. (they'll compile, but for your barton).
therefore, DON'T COMPILE GCC ON YOUR AMD SYSTEM

when you get to kernel config: MAKE SURE TO HAVE SUPPORT FOR BOTH COMPUTERS' DEVICES
the essential shit: networking, filesystems, hard drive controller
software:
you want as little shitty bloat as possible
word processing: abiword
email: thunderbird ran, it wasn't snappy by any means
web: dillo is damn fast, but a lot of pages don't work correctly. next is firebird, but this is a memory hog in comparison to your avail resources.
music: xmms, or a console based player
movies: using -framedrop my 300MHz was able to play all my divx files and DVDs fully smooth with mplayer 0.92 (haven't tried the newer ones)
im: x-chat and gaim are my favorites, whatever you want will probably run
i'm not sure if it was me or what, but be ready for some shit slow hard drive transfer rates (i was using gentoo-sources, but tried many others).

don't worry about installing a bootloader, you'll want to install lilo/grub to your /boot partition, and make this bootable. then, in your p2's bios, make this hard drive bootable. chances are, it'll be fine. if not, load the livecd, chroot into your environment, run grub/lilo and exit/reboot)
 
On a machine like that, I'd stay as far from Gentoo as possible. You're not going to see an increase in performance, and you'll have fun trying to keep the system updated.

If it was my machine, I'd just use VectorLinux.
 
Originally posted by RazeDS
On a machine like that, I'd stay as far from Gentoo as possible. You're not going to see an increase in performance, and you'll have fun trying to keep the system updated.

If it was my machine, I'd just use VectorLinux.
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well, in reply to the updating i just use distcc on my computer. but i looked at vectorlinux's website, it looks kinda cool gonna give it a spin tonight, i'll report back (after using it with only 64MBs RAM; i'll pull 2 of my DIMMS so it's a bit more like the goal computer)
 
if you're worried about compile time fo stuff like kde/gnome/openoffice, i'm pretty sure you can specify a inary download only... large download, but no days of compiling neccesary... however, i too reccomend distcc... that speeds stuff up alot if you have a few computers in the gigahertz range...
 
yes, you can emerge binaries of certain programs, mostly just the big ones like kde, gnome, maybe x (just use the -k option in emerge). You can dl binaries of many other programs. It is possible to build some packages on a faster machine, but make sure you are cross compiling (compiling for multiple archs). No mcpu or march flags on gcc, or if it is, make sure they are the correct ones for the architecture you want the binary to run on. You should probably be ok starting from a stage 3 install, the bootsrapping and system emerge took a long time on my 2 ghz machine, cant imagine what they would be for you.
as another email client, i would recommend sylpheed-claws. It is pretty basic, and it shouldnt take up too much mem. You should seriously comsider getting another stick of ram though...
 
big update !!

i found 2 sticks of 128 in a old broken computer i had. i did not think they where going to be compatilble but they work ! and now i have 320mb of ram . even though i have more ram i still might want to go with something made for slower comps

the vector linux looks pretty interesting .. i have some reading to do :D

(hopefully these memory sticks hang in and there are no issues)
 
well, i haven't gotten around to installing vector yet, but i just got back from a joyous 64MB experience under gentoo. heh, it's not quite as bad as i thought it'd be as long as you have low-memory applications. but compiling anything? lol don't even try it. well it's not THAT bad but it's close. Also, using svgalib is vastly superior to X with 64MBs of RAM. however, since you just found a beautiful amount of memory for this computer's age, X will work fine (i still recommend the freedesktop.org server - search for freedesktop.org ebuilds on forums.gentoo.org)
 
Originally posted by hellomcfly
(hopefully these memory sticks hang in and there are no issues)
Click to expand...

If you aren't sure how good the new sticks are, you could run Memtest on them overnight to make sure they're dependable.
 
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