What's the oldest computer you've got Gentoo on?

CaptainRabies · n00b Joined: 13 Sep 2012 Posts: 12

I've been given a computer as part of an estate liquidation. It's a Gateway with a Pentium III, 128M of ram, an ATI Rage 128 GPU, no Ethernet (phoneline only) and a whole bunch of wide ribbon connectors I've only ever heard described on wikipedia before. I think they're PATA cables, but I can't be sure. It was manufactured in '99, and I just turned it on a few minutes ago. It has Windows 98 installed currently, and I'm thinking of turning it Gentoo.
I'm confident somebody out there has installed Gentoo on an abacus, I just want to hear from you guys (mostly to talk myself into the project). So, let's hear it: What's your oldest, currently-running machine?
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sikpuppy · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2012 7:21 am Post subject:

I have an ASUS A1000 from about 2001, the specs are here: Specs.
It's got LXDE as the window manager and I use it when I want to sit in the garden and do stuff. The battery is dead, but I use a power point otherwise reserved for a pond pump and an old USB wi-fi adapter for ethernet which actually works.

It's probably massively out of date since I did the initial emerge about 2007, and haven't updated the thing for years. I do remember that it took the best part of a day to build since I made the mistake of emerging Firefox and various other monster timewasters.

It still boots however, and manages SD video without too much chunky action which is what I use it for mostly, to watch TV shows using headphones in the garden and having a beer.

aidanjt · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2012 7:22 am Post subject:

I've installed Gentoo on a VIA C3 machine, which would be a fair bit slower than a PIII. It's painful, but doable.
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BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

notageek · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2012 8:54 am Post subject:

I installed Gentoo, first on a three year old computer in 2008. Single core, with about 1GB RAM, AMD64 2800+ I wouldn't say I was disappointed with its speed (it was snappier to use than some of the other Linux distros I was using at the time) but I thought "if this is fast, how fast will it be on a quad core?"

So I upgraded to a quad core, 6GB RAM. Yes, it's even snappier. In-case you were wondering.
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Dr.Willy · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2012 9:42 am Post subject:

Not the oldest, but my AMD Geode LX (@ 500MHz) probably qualifies. It does have 1GB of ram though.

John-Boy · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2012 12:01 pm Post subject:

AMD K6 laptop (300 MHZ). Cut my Gentoo teeth on that.
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Crooksey · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2012 12:35 pm Post subject:

I have an old P3 desktop with the same specs, it runs

*Gentoo
*Xorg + Fluxbox
*Wireless card through PCI

Boots in under 10seconds, also has firefox (non binary version)

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2022 Location: Germany

Dell Poweredge. 2x1,2Ghz Tualatin, 256 mb ECC ram. 4x15K SCSI disks. Occasionally use it as backup spooler to feed my tape lib. Extremely noisy.
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BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2022 Location: Germany

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2022 Location: Germany

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

Spinning like an Iranian nuclear fuel enrichment plan.
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NotQuiteSane · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 3:00 am Post subject:

currently running? probably my ultra 10.

but when i first installed gentoo it was onto a compaq server with dual pentium pro chips and 48mb of ram. Your p3/128mb is world ahead of what i had. and that machine was retired due to SCSI cost, not performance.

at least you didn't post "I'm thinking of trying gentoo. is a core i7 fast enough?".

NQS
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BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

Things change, though. It takes more power to run Linux than it did just a few years ago. If you're running it on an old uniprocessor these days it's like you're driving a two-horse wagon with one of the horses unhooked and lying in the wagon, along for the ride as dead weight, and the other one's thrown a shoe, gone blind, and has the shits. If you're running a desktop it's like that nag is not only pulling that dead weight but a dump-truck's load of garbage too.

Where's richk449 to admire my knotty, inurbane analogy.
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NotQuiteSane · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 5:14 am Post subject:

oh, I agree. it's the idea that "last years model" is too old to run gentoo that gets me.

of course much of the problem is people running kde/gnome with all the bells and whistles instead of what they actually need and use

NQS
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These opinions are mine, mine I say! Piss off and get your own.

As I see it -- An irregular blog, Improved with new location

To delete French language packs from system use 'sudo rm -fr /'

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

eccerr0r · Advocate Joined: 01 Jul 2004 Posts: 2998 Location: USA

Hmm... think this is slowest so far:

Geode GX1 266MHz, 256MB RAM, 2GB HDD. Using as embedded server/IRC bot, and currently running a "full" Gentoo, as in, yes I run "emerge -u world" on it and it's heavily assisted through distcc (even my AthlonXP 2200+ is much faster than this machine, and I already think the AthlonXP needs an upgrade...).

No X11 though. And there are ports on this that are visible to the world (I can ssh to it on default port) :)

piwacet · Guru Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 484

I ran Gentoo for years on a 450 mHz PIII. It had a bit more RAM than yours though. The initial install is the hardest part... once you get to the point of having an x-server, you can just run all those emerges and updates in the background while you do other stuff. I suspect the hardest part will be the RAM, as many compiles these days take more RAM. If you can find a way to increase the RAM, that would be good.

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

We should have a "least bogomips" contest. :lol:

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woddfellow2 · n00b Joined: 01 Dec 2009 Posts: 20 Location: United States

When I used Gentoo from December 2009 to April 2010, it was on a box with a single-core 1.15 GHz AMD Athlon and 512 MB of RAM.

My current Gentoo box (my other boxes run Arch (Parabola) and Slackware) has a 2.3 GHz single-core AMD Sempron and 3 GB of RAM. Compilation is not too slow there.
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danomac · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 4:37 pm Post subject:

I ran it on my Pentium MMX 233 with 8 MB RAM for a firewall. It also had a huge disk - 200 MB. Actually, I think it had 3 of those, one was for logs. I used it as a router.

Sadly that box died in 2007. It had a long life.

eccerr0r · Advocate Joined: 01 Jul 2004 Posts: 2998 Location: USA

Technically the 266MHz GX1 isn't *that* old but it's still pitifully slow.

My AthlonXP 2200+ (both after running a few times to make sure it's cached)

tylerwylie · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 11:19 pm Post subject:

I've installed on a Pentium 3 box before but used a P4 box with DistCC to assist with some of the heavy lifting. This was back when Gentoo was pretty good, ~2004-2005.
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