PII 300, 64 mb RAM --is it enough for gentoo?

[Guest]

Hi. I have an old pentium II 300 mhz Dell Dimension with 64 mb ram running Redhat 7.3. It's a little choppy with kde 3, but I only use it to play music so its okay.

I'd like to put gentoo on it, but I'm not sure if its powerful enough to compile kde, etc., particularly since it has so little ram.

Should I go for it? Time isn't much of an issue, I can leave it compilling for a couple days. Do you think it will be able complete the build process without crashing? Also, what compiler do you recommend I use? Should I try gcc 3?

[phong]

I've compiled on a P133 and P100 with 64 megs, and others have gotten by on less. It will be slow to compile, but it will work.
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[markpmc]

I'm running a K6-2 400 w/ 64 MB. I migrated to 1.3b a week or so ago. Compiling a kernel takes a little over an hours. X will take all night, so will kde.

You may want to just grab a stage 3 tarball and skip most of the compiling.

If you're on an old PC w/ a small hard drive, you could run into a disk space problem. Break your large "emerges" into smaller bites.

ie. The Desktop guide recommends emereging kde (or gnome) to build and install X. I'd recommend that you emerge xfree86 and then emerge your desktop/wm afterwards.

Good Luck,

Mark

[Pigeon]

Yeah, it'll work fine. Well- it'll take about 4 days to compile a complete desktop system but it'll work fine once it's finished.

Some brave/loony souls have installed gentoo on as little as a P100.

[Erukian]

ram is really what you need. If you can your hands on it. If your at 128 or less, it will SOOOOO help you out with compile times. Not upgrading the cpu. Ram is more important for compiling i hear.

[delta407]

Agreed. I would look to pick up a 128 MB stick for $20 at a local computer shop. You would be much happier, since you probably wouldn't swap to disk often, and RAM is thousands of times faster than the hard drive.

If you really don't want to fork over $20, you could always buy it during the install, compile everything you want, and then return it.
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[fazer]

[delta407]

If you can spare the compile time, many have found Gentoo to run much faster than other distributions. Gentoo runs pretty fast on one of my laptops (Pentium 133, 24 MB of RAM) -- even though recompiling the kernel "in the wild" takes nearly an hour and there's no way I would try to bootstrap on a 133 (I did some clever tricks using VMware) -- I would highly recommend Gentoo for low-power boxen.

Seriously, if you can start an install on a Friday night (much like this one), let it grind over the weekend (`scripts/boostrap.sh && emerge system`), and come back on Monday, you will be much happier than running, say, Red Hat. You will also have a much leaner system...
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I don't believe in witty sigs.

[fazer]

Wow, that's great! But does your laptop have a GUI? Which one?

Also, does anyone know where I can get cheap quality RAM that would ship internationally or atleast all over North America? I am located in Canada and most good online retails don't ship to Canada, or if they do, the taxes and shipping charges are not worth paying since they are more expensive compared to local sale prices. I have seen RAM prices of a P133 128 MB - 168 PIN RAM module selling for $15.00 on pricewatch.com. That would be a sweet price if you convert it CAD and add taxes + shipping. It might be the same price as local retailers here or even more.

So if anyone knows where I can get such ram delivered here, please do let me know.

Thanks in advance.

[delta407]