Journey of a Lenovo S10-2 Notebook

[bghoons]

I have a Lenovo S10-2 Notebook about 8 years old. It came with Windows XP but I wiped that away within a year of getting it because I'm just not a Windows person. I have no animus against MicroSoft.
Around 2011 I tried to put Gentoo on it but that flopped so the Lenovo went into a storage closet for a few years. One day I dug it out of the closet and installed OpenSUSE with a bunch of a games to try and fob it off to friends or relatives but tablets and iPhones were all the rage so nobody was interested. I couldn't give it away! I suppose I could have taken the trouble to post it on Craigslist but I did not want to bother with that. I kept the Lenovo, figuring I could use it for something, and eventually I did find a good use for it: secure accounting.
Since 2014 the OS has been OpenBSD 5.5 which is about 3 years out of date but works flawlessly, a stable workhorse of an OS. The desktop is XFCE. I do not connect to the internet --no linkee, no findee, and it is only used to record accounting transactions for budget and taxes using Gnumeric. Occasionally I play XScrabble on it. That is about all the software I have installed which is no more than I need. Because of this dedicated machine, used solely for accounting, I am always aware of my budget and financial situation which is average, if you want to know. There is no Lamborghini in my future, only linguini.

While working with Gnumeric, I have noticed that when opening large files there is a delay of about 5 or 10 seconds. I have been wondering if it is OpenBSD with its UFS file system, or is it the memory limitations of the Lenovo Notebook?

And lately, there is some other software I've been wanting to add but that would require a complete OS re-install so I decided "Hey, let's try and put Gentoo back on it like I tried years ago! Wouldn't that be a hoot? I can see if Gnumeric runs faster and if the Gentoo install does not work out, well, I can download and install OpenBSD within an hour and be right back to where I was, no big deal."

Please note I'm not trying to pimp out OpenBSD, or make recommendations for it, or claim it is better or worse than any other OS. OpenBSD is just a tool I am familiar with and like to use according to my preferences. I've used OpenBSD off and on since 2007. I enjoy using it but like a distro whore, I'm too promiscuous to commit exclusively to it.

Here are some specs for the very outdated but still functional Lenovo S10-2:

1.6GHz N270 Intel Atom Processor
1GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz
Broadcom 11b/g Wi-Fi wireless (not used --"g" would slow everyone's connection: everyone is using "g+ and "n" on the "n" router)
160GB hard drive

A portion of the /etc/portage/make.conf

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=atom -mtune=generic -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
CPU_FLAGS_X86="mmx mmxext sse sse2 sse3 ssse3" (obtained by the very useful cpuid2cpuflags script)

So how did it go? I chose not to use SystemD but stay with the tried-n-true SystemV. I have not researched the system resources consumed by SystemD, whether it uses more or less than SystemV. There are also extra steps involved getting SystemD going and I wanted to avoid that.

Day 1
Using a LiveDVD booted up early in the morning, then a few hours later got to the kernel install part. I left to go do some things while the kernel compiled but when I came back, the screensaver had activated by default (I did not know it would do this) and I was locked out of the machine. Nothing I tried could get me back in. My Google-fu failed. Gentoo scrambles the root password and poor me did not create a new one before beginning. I had to abort the installation.

Day 2
I decided to use a LiveCD with no graphical environment, figuring it would give me a little more memory to work with, and there would be no screensaver to kick me in the balls like last time. I set up everything again then began installing the kernel. I leave for a few hours and come back to see the machine is dead. "Oh no, I killed it with all this compiling" I thought, "or maybe the power has gone out?" I checked the router and saw lights so it was not the power. Looking down, laying snaked across the floor was the power cord I had forgotten to plug in. I had killed the battery. I felt stupid. I have (so I'm told) high intelligence yet still I do stupid stuff like this. Guess I'll have to try another day

Day 3
Installed the kernel but ended up with a kernel panic. Re-installed the kernel but my wired network interface enp3s0 was not showing up. I located the 8139 modules on the machine but insmod and modprobe failed and failed again with "not found" errors. The modules WOULD NOT LOAD, like I was trying to pound a big square peg into a small round hole. After shouting in frustration at yet another failure to install Gentoo, and giving the Lenovo an angry death glare, I gave up for the day, deciding to take a few days to research the cause of which I was sure was not incompetence.

Day 4 --morning
My previous research, and my intuition determined that during the menuconfig stage, when selecting the drivers buried way far down in nested sub-directories, do not have an <M> but instead have it as <*>. When I found the kernel modules for my wired ethernet card, I felt like I had found the proverbial needle in a haystack. I had to dig through long listings of words like AccuTek and Marvell and all these other names of drivers I have not the slightest knowledge about. I was afraid to uncheck any of them lest I lop off one of the innumerable tentacles that is the Linux kernel and it panics on me again. I did disable Reiserfs, and some other things I was absolutely certain I would not need. I want to go back and tweak the kernel more to prune out things not needed but that takes hours and hours and hours, time I really do not want to allocate.

Day 4 --evening

Hallelujah! Finally --FINALLY it worked. The kernel did not panic and ifconfig showed my wired ethernet card. There was a brief moment of horror when after rebooting the machine to test that it really, really was working and not a fluke, I saw an error message "ext3 not...doing this..." I thought "Oh no, here we go again, another problem. Did I mess up the fstab switching the UUID for swap for boot?" My fears were unwarranted when I logged in and saw everything was fine, and rebooting did not return that error again.

Day 5
Begin 8:28 AM emerge x11 base End: 7:21 PM 11 hours
Begin 7:22 PM emerge -av media-fonts/x11fonts-jmk End: 7:27 PM 6 minutes
Begin 7:35 PM emerge xfce-meta package End: 1:04 AM 5-1/2 hours

Day 6
Emerge the rest of the XFCE desktop like terminal etc. 30 minutes
Begin 07:04 emerge Gnumeric End: 8:45 AM 1 hour, 40 minutes

Emerged a few other things but not Xscrabble. It does not work. The computer player makes plays not connected to the other letters. It's broken.

So, this exercise took 6 days to get Gentoo installed. The first few days were not consecutive so it took about 2 weeks to get it all done.
After I finished, I felt like someone who had entered a 5-story building wanting to go to the 5th Floor. I could have just entered the elevator and pressed "5" (binary install) to get up there. Instead, using Gentoo, I had to bring a hammer, nails, and planks to build my own stairs in the
empty stairwell and then climb all those stairs myself to the 5th Floor after all that work. Although proud of my achievement, it left me scratching my head wondering whether it was the best use of my time. Granted, I did not sit there the whole time watching it compile. I would type "emerge" and when it began I left to do other things. checking occasionally to see the progress. Still, all of this was a considerable effort on my part.

Someone might ask, 'Why...WHY would you spend 6 days installing and compiling a source-based OS when in a far shorter amount of time you could install a non source-based OS and save yourself all that trouble? Are you some kind of a nutcase? A masochist? I don't get it. I just don't. Why? In that amount of time you could have manually installed a binary OS on 50 or more servers in a data center! You could have driven from Maryland to California and back halfway!"

Well, I ask myself that sometimes. I do not know why I go to the trouble. Perhaps it is the feeling of accomplishment of "rolling my own", kind of like the feeling (I suppose --I wouldn't know) of a Wild West cowboy rolling their own cigarettes instead of getting store-bought pre-rolled cigarettes. Maybe I like the challenge Gentoo poses at times, like modules not loading, and I enjoy an OS that "fights back" at me and I can vanquish it once I am done. And I like having extra things to do when using Gentoo like manually updating and configuring things, tinkering and such. I cannot explain why I like using Gentoo. It is just one of those things where, when you try it, a light comes on on the porchlight of your frontal lobe and you say "Yes, this is it, this is what I like: I like Gentoo." I am still split between Gentoo and OpenBSD.I like both very much.

The Gnumeric slowness? After testing it out I see that it is no faster than when using OpenBSD. The slowness is caused by the software and/or memory limitations of the Lenovo Notebook. When checking on the Gnumeric compile I saw this disturbing error: "What should we do here, and why do we leak /tmp?" That does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling, making me wonder will Gnumeric sum all my columns correctly? I guess I will find out as I record March expenditures and other financial transactions. I've got a blank CD nearby to get OpenBSD again if Gnumeric fails me. This error is with the Gnumeric code itself, not anything with Gentoo which is not responsible for code quality in 3rd Party software programs. The warning error might not even be anything at all. I do not expect Gnumeric to fail me on Gentoo but who knows? I may have left out a piece of the software puzzle, maybe some obscure library forgotten to be included that, like XScrabble, will cause it to do weird things.

XFCE runs well. Typing "free -hm" I see only 79 mb of memory is used. Before entering the X environment, this command showed only 46 mb are used so it appears XFCE only uses 23 mb. That is really good! It is why I chose that desktop environment because memory is limited. Gnome, on the other hand, on CentOS 7 using SystemD, uses 319 mb but I do not know how much of that is system and SystemD memory. Regardless, that's a pretty small memory footprint.

Just another day in the life of a Gentoo user.

[NeddySeagoon]

bghoons,

You are not alone. I still run Gentoo on a Acer One A110L that started life with a 8G SSD, 512Mb RAM and Linpus Linux.
Its the same CPU as your Lenvo and has had a RAM upgrade to 1.5Gb.

It sill builds libreoffice and firefox. As it only has an 8G HDD, I build on a USB drive and copy the install over if I want to be portable.
It just fits in 8G.

I keep intending to set up distcc but I've never got round to it.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[bghoons]

Neddy, that is incredible doing all that on an 8 gb drive. That is a fait accompli for sure.

DistCC --ah yes, I have been researching that but haven't come up with much that is not outdated. I will need to sit down one day and thoroughly read the details to get it right. When/if I do get it right, I will document my steps and submit them to Gentoo for approval to help others with DistCC.

Long compile times is a major negative when using Gentoo. It took the Lenovo 11 hours to compile x11-base. That is prohibitive for most people.

What I envision is, I have an old 4-port wireless "b/g" router that was long ago replaced by an "n" router. What I would like to do is hook up spare computers when not in use and form a spider web of machines all assisting with the compile. Or, do this among all the machines connected to my network. But this is beyond my skill at the moment, and requires an investment of time.

If I can cut down the compile time, I could spend more time tweaking the kernel properly and cutting out stuff not needed. It really would be helpful during menuconfig, the kernel options were more streamlined, or you could sort by vendor name to get right to the drivers you need and quickly prune out the drivers you don't need. This may can be done in the .config file or some other file but my kernel experience is inadequate.

[NeddySeagoon]

bghoons,

distcc and even cross distcc are well documented on the Gentoo wiki.
WiFi is slow and only half duplex, so its not the best thing for distributed compiling.

There are other ways of building for resource poor systems too.
Build in a chroot for the target, then install the binaries.
Export the targets root filesystem over NFS and build on a different machine.
These methods require that the build host can execute the targets code.

I don't build in 8G of SSD. I build on a USB HDD and squeeze the binary install into 8G.
No kernel sources, no distfiles, no packages, no portage tree, ...
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.