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Should I give up on 32bit?
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Engaged-Unbundle
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2021 4:13 am    Post subject: Should I give up on 32bit? Reply with quote

I have an old, high-end laptop that's a lot better than a Raspberry Pi in all respects, except being 32bit.

It's currently running Ubuntu (for convenience; I did find it lower maintenance 8 years ago) as a simple syncthing backup mirror for the devices in the house.

I'd like to use it for every LAN server situation I can and whenever I need a linux but
More and more packages are complaining with "no installation candidate".

I thought Gentoo has to be an option, using source and compiles but maybe I'm wasting my time and what I really need to do is get a Raspberry Pi and submit to landfill.

Recent packages I wanted to run on Ubuntu but couldn't:
- mautrix-whatsapp
- imageproxy
- archivebox
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2021 7:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Engaged-Unbundle,

You have two separate questions here.

There is building and maintaining Gentoo.
There is running Gentoo.

They need not be on the same system. Even if they are, distcc may be useful.
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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sdauth
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2021 7:47 am    Post subject: Re: Should I give up on 32bit? Reply with quote

Engaged-Unbundle wrote:

Recent packages I wanted to run on Ubuntu but couldn't:
- mautrix-whatsapp
- imageproxy
- archivebox


There are no available ebuild for these currently on Gentoo. On the other hand, you could use Docker for these specific applications. (Maybe even on your current Ubuntu installation)
From a quick search : (might work or not)
https://archivebox.io/#quickstart ( https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/master/docker-compose.yml )
https://github.com/willnorris/imageproxy/blob/main/Dockerfile
https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/whatsapp/setup/docker.html

If you really wish to use Gentoo on your 32bit laptop, then you could go with a minimal setup, with only basic service, docker-cli. You need to figure out if it's worth it though and most likely you'll need to use it as minimal as possible to minimize the compilation, rebuild etc.. especially on old hardware. (An other option here is to build your packages on a chrooted Gentoo 32bit install on a more beefy hardware and then pull those packages on your 32bit laptop)
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Engaged-Unbundle
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2021 9:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There should be distcc SAAS. Being able to rent compile time this way would be very handy. Is there anything out there? I only have a slightly old MacBook but with OSX to donate to this temporarily. Is this a thing?

NeddySeagoon wrote:
Engaged-Unbundle,

You have two separate questions here.

There is building and maintaining Gentoo.
There is running Gentoo.

They need not be on the same system. Even if they are, distcc may be useful.
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NeddySeagoon
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2021 4:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Engaged-Unbundle,

distcc needs lots of network bandwidth, so its not a good candidate for SAAS.
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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Hu
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 13, 2021 5:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As a first approximation, consider the size of all the .o files in your build directory after a package has built. A distcc-as-a-service would require downloading all of those (assuming you dist'd out every file, and built none locally). It would also require uploading every source file in post-processed form. Since we assume you are severely CPU starved on the client (which is why you want to distcc-as-a-service at all), you probably don't want to spend much CPU time compressing those post-processed files, which means they are quite large on upload. Most home users have poor upload bandwidth to the Internet. distcc bandwidth requirements are fairly easy to satisfy on a home network, but not when the peer is at the far end of a consumer ISP.

This doesn't even consider that such a service requires you to trust the provider not to miscompile anything, whether accidentally via bad flags or maliciously.
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figueroa
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 14, 2021 3:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I continue to maintain 32 bit Gentoo on an old LOW-END laptop; Celeron M, 4 GB RAM. I don't watch it compile, but it does quite well. I maintain three other 32 bit Gentoo systems on now ancient desktop machines.
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acmondor
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 17, 2021 3:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I continue to use Gentoo on a 16 year old ASUS Laptop with a single core Pentium M processor and about 1.2GB RAM. However, I use a QEMU/KVM Virtual Machine running a more powerful amd64 system as a bin host build machine. The configuration of the vitrual machine is almost identical to the laptop, except for amount of RAM and number of CPUs, so these days about only thing I actually compile on the laptop is the linux kernel.

I originally started out using distcc, but found that much slower and more tedious to maintain. I understand one could potentially get a setup similar to my virtual machine using a chroot environment, but I haven't yet attempted that. The one thing QEMU/KVM allows that a chroot environment wouldn't is the CPU selection. I currently use one that's as close of a match as possible to the Pentium M on the laptop, although I'm not sure how important that really is.

Anyway, I find this setup works quite well and it's very little effort to maintain along side my amd64 systems.

I run KDE on the laptop like I do on my desktop machine and both are minimally configured so performance is quite good. A couple years ago I replaced the aging spinning disk drive with a solid state drive (via a special M.2 NGFF SSD to 2.5 IDE adapter card) and that provided a huge performance improvement.
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