how and how big?

Message

Yuusou · Post by **Yuusou** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 2:55 am

Okay, I completed a universal stage 3 recently on a laptop that didn't even meet minimum requirements. (don't ask how, there's a lot of things even I can't explain right now o_o). Anyways, I am now considering emerging kde on it or even just X. However, I want to know how to do this from the package CD. I had some issue from it before about it trying to download from internet despite me following the guide. In addition, approximately how big will this be? I have only 1.1GB space left, will kde or just X or even fluxbox fit on this and still have a bit of room left for text docs and stuff? Thanks.

remi2402 · Post by **remi2402** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 3:26 am

xorg itself takes about 300Megs. Full kde (same for gnome) will take some more space (at least 300 megs I think, whip count) If you add openoffice then I guess there's a chance it could fit, but that'd be incredibly tight. You probably wouldn't have enough space to run updates now and then.

The lowest HDD I had gentoo on was a 2,5 gig and that was only for a router, so no xorg, no gnome, just the kernel and a few utilities.

There's a chance you could pull it off, but it'd be very complicated in the long run.

Hope that helps

Rémi

Yuusou · Post by **Yuusou** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 3:32 am

well, the thing is, I somehow managed to do the base system in only just a bit over 800MB. So if I only add 300 for X and 300 for KDE, that's still only 1.4GB. wouldn't that work?

Keep in mind, this laptop has no network connectivity yet, so updates are impossible anyways

loki99 · Post by **loki99** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 5:45 am

But why would you use kde, if the lappy is old and most probably underpowered. I'd use something like fvwm or blackbox.

Especially if you don't have to much ram. Not only the DE will take for ever to start, but the applications too.

krakrjak · Post by **krakrjak** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 7:20 am

To answer your original question you use emerge -K and make sure your make.conf has a PKGDIR set to where the binary packages are. By default this is /usr/portage/packages. Also the -K says binary only so if it can't find a binary package it won't install.

Good luck witht he laptop. I also recommend BlackBox if the space gets too tight, but KDE can be quite stripped down if you need it to be.

remi2402 · Post by **remi2402** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 4:33 pm

Yes you could get there

but beware of the bumpy road ahead of you.

If you want to save both disk space and memory footprint, you could try disabling some fonts in xorg. That has helped me before. Just like loki99 recommended, blackbox or fluxbox is a good choice for a lightweight window manager, add abiword/gnumeric/koffice instead of OOo and you'll be good to go.

If you go for koffice, that'll need kdelibs and if you go for abiword, you'll need gnome/gtk libs. I won't say which one is bigger than the other

but you should pick one set of libs and stick to it if you're real short on disk space.

Rémi

Wietze · Post by **Wietze** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 5:32 pm

Xorg + openbox/fluxbox + vim

And you are set baby