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Hairball
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 08, 2002 11:48 pm    Post subject: Installing Gentoo on old/slow Laptop Reply with quote

I'm a poor student and someone was generous enough to donate an old laptop of theirs to me so I could play/work with it. I have Gentoo on my desktop machine and I love it. I want to put it on this laptop, but it's a Pentium 100 with only 24mb RAM. It took a decent amount of time to install Gentoo on my P3 550 so I don't think compiling everything from scratch is going to work for me on the laptop (I don't really want to leave it compiling for days). I know portage has the whole install from binary package option and I want to use that, however, I have my make.conf file on my desktop machine optimizing binaries for the i686 architectures and I'm pretty sure that those won't run on a Pentium 100 (which I think is i586). Is there a way to do what I want to do? Also, how do you get the binary package create option to compile all the dependencies too? Any help (or links to other documentation that I haven't yet read) would be appreciated!

I'm open to using another distribution (suggestions?) just to get linux on the laptop, but I'd really like to use Gentoo!
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Luder99
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 09, 2002 2:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Took me about 3 weeks total to get my machine up on Gentoo, Pentium 120/32M and that was from stage 3, on and off sort of. You might not have much luck with Gentoo on that, BUT you can compile your stuff on a faster machine if you wanted to.

You COULD try a stage 3 tarball on the laptop. Change your USE flags on the P3 and compile everything to binary, then install on the laptop. Bootstraping, etc won't really speed up your PC over a stage 3. You are basically optimizing your compiler for your PC. That will make your compile times faster, but won't change the compiled programs. Basically, I should be able to compile AMD T-Bird binaries on my Classic Pentium laptop, but that's just silly to do. Or so I was told.

A distro that worked remarkably well for me on that same laptop was VectorLinux which is supposedly built for speed and less capable machines if need be. http://ibiblio.org/vectorlinux/.

You probably won't be able to run Xfree 4.2.x on that machine, VectorLinux has 3.3.6 available if need be. Installed very easily for me, however I wanted to try Gentoo for the speed. Gentoo is faster, however I don't have quite the same setup (progs) as Vector. There are tons of lightweight Linux distros. You could even try Tom's Boot & Root which fits on a floppy. I used that to get my laptop on the Internet to DL the Stage3 tarball.

Hope that helps...
KARL
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dripton
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 09, 2002 8:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rather than manually cross-compiling and shipping files over, you might want to try using distcc.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=19725&highlight=distcc

http://distcc.samba.org/faq.html

Caveat:
distcc is currently very insecure. Only run distccd when you're using it, not all the time. And make sure the distcc port is firewalled off from any untrusted machines.
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Hairball
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 10, 2002 6:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That distcc thing sounds like it could help a lot! However, if I use it (or just compile binary packages straight out on my desktop machine), will it work if my desktop's $CHOST is set to "i686-pc-linux-gnu" and the laptop's $CHOST is set to "i586-pc-linux-gnu"? The laptop is a Pentium classic processor so I think that falls under the i586 category. I don't know much about the optimizations gcc does for specific processors (and how to turn them on or off) or how cross-compiling works at all. Any suggestions or insights?
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Luder99
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 10, 2002 11:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm running at i686 on my Pentium 120 Mhz, so it shouldn't be a problem. Although, all you would need to do is change your desktop CHOST to whatever you want to build for and compile away. It will create binaries for whatever the current CHOST is.

Hope that helps...
KARL
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hielvc
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 11, 2002 2:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You might look at this link for IBM developer works

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-lwl1/?dwzone=linux

He is dealing with the same problem. Another idea would be to put on zipslack. You can get the source files and using the install scripts recompile them useing "march=i586" ,yes that is setting for a pentium 100. A handy resouce for how to do this is the Linuxfromscratch manual. Oh zipslack is about 100megs with no xwindows. Or using LFS manual you can do what this person, in the link, is doing. You can "emerge linuxfromscratch" to get the manual.

hielvc
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Luder99
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 11, 2002 2:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

My bad, you are right, i586... Sorry...
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LugnutsForBrains
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 11, 2002 5:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a 486 75MHz laptop that I was trying to install 1.2 on (from stage 1). It just would not go. I think that there was not enough RAM to do the job. I ended up putting Debian on it and while it is not Gentoo, it is pretty good.
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