Installing gentoo on a VERY old laptop?

[dolphinling]

I recently got a very old laptop. To give you an idea of just how old it is, it has two stickers on it that say "Designed for Windows 95" and "Intel Inside, Pentium" It's a TI Extensa 390. From what I can tell, it has 64 MB of memory and a 233 MHz cpu.

I'd like to install Gentoo on it.

I have two problems with this. First, I don't want to do all the compiling on this machine. I may be insane, but I'm not *that* insane. I know you can set up portage so that packages are pulled from a local repository instead of the main repositories, but can this be done with binary, cross-compiled packages? Can someone point me to any documentation on this?

Second, the laptop only has 64 MB of ram. And Gentoo's installation CD, unfortunately, seems to require at least 128. So I need some way to actually install in the first place. I'm currently running Puppy Linux (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and various other distros I tried all needed 128 or 256). What would be needed to hack the install into place from inside what I have? Or can anyone suggest some other way to install Gentoo on here?

Thanks
--dolphinling


In case anyone's curious, it has an 800x600 screen, a cd rom drive, a 40 gig HD (!) (upgraded by its previous owner at some point in the past), and I've found a wired PCMCIA network card for it. The HD's cover fell of, so it's taped in place, the battery's cover is still there but broken, so that's taped in place, the screen used to only like to work when opened to a certain angle (I may have fixed that), and amazingly it appears to have a USB port, presumably 1.0.

[mattsteven]

I've done this on a very similar laptop. It has been awhile however, the key is to use a lighter glibc.

See this for details, it is not for the complete beginner, but it is a fun hobby project.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/Embedded_Gentoo

Note that you will not be able to run firefox and many other applications on uclibc..

[dolphinling]

Thanks for the link. I'll look into it, although I was hoping to have a "normal" environment, though potentially not run X most of the time.

Also, I just noticed that apparently the 2007.0 release lowered the minimum requirements from 128 MB ram to 64 MB ram (2007.0, 2006.1), so I'm trying that now.

[Sadako]

Note that you will not be able to run firefox and many other applications on uclibc..

You'd have to be nuts to run firefox on a machine with only 64 mb ram anyway.

I have a 500 MHz pIII laptop, which is quite a bit more powerful than your new toy, but whenever I'm doing a big update or a clean install I simply pull the drive and connect it to a far more powerful desktop, and then I just chroot into the drive's filesystems and install from there, just like you would using the livecd on the host system.

You could start preparing the new install in a directory on the more powerful system immediately, and just create the filesystems on the laptop's drive and copy the installation when ready.

You can even install the boot loader to the drives' mbr like this, which means you could use it as a way to install on and old laptop which doesn't even have a (bootable) cd drive.

Laptop to desktop ide kits are really cheap, and most portable hard disk enclosures use a standard laptop ide drive, so you could even connect it with one of those if you had one handy.

For the record: my laptop boots, I startx from the console, e16 and conky running and there is only ~22 mb ram used, and it's a pretty standard installation i.e. not optimised for a low-memory machine.

[cwr]

I've installed Gentoo 2005.1 (which was what I had at the time) on a very old _desktop_,
a 133MHz P3 with 64MB of RAM. I booted a Damn Small Linux distro to get a working
network connection (I had to boot from a floppy, in fact, to run a CD boot loader) and
then copied most of my Gentoo installation across from another machine.

However, I don't run X on this this (tho' DSL's window manager runs fine). Multiple
terminals are quite useable on this sort of hardware, which I use only as a test
machine for networking setups.

Hope this helps - Will

[danomac]

I installed gentoo on my old P2-266 laptop with 64M RAM. This was, uh, over a year ago and it's still compiling KDE!

Just kidding. I didn't install any graphical environment. Compiling anything on it takes forever. If I remember right, the kernel took like 4 hours or something. Honestly speaking, I wouldn't try that again. It kind of made me wonder if newer binary distros would even be able to boot into a GUI on that laptop.

[cwr]

Well, DSL has some sort of GUI (fluxbox?) which is useable in 64MB. And although
I'm not about to try compiling a kernel from scratch, editing .config and recompiling
is possible, if slow. I've even compiled some larger packages simply by leaving
the machine overnight - it doesn't have anything else to do...

Will

[ShinyThings]

I have a Pentium2 233MHz laptop with 64MB of RAM. I installed and ran Vector Linux and it ran very effectively. Firefox took time to load and was rather slow, but the performance was rather acceptable. I also installed Gentoo on it, and it ran fine. I used icecream for compile distributing, so that was also acceptable. I even installed FreeBSD, and used binary packages, and that ran well enough, too. I would think that you should be fine.

[PaulHindt]

You'd have to be nuts to run firefox on a machine with only 64 mb ram anyway.

I have Ubuntu and Win98 dual booted on an old Compaq armada with only 64MB of RAM...Firefox works great.

Although, I installed Gentoo on an old Celeron 300A machine (it ceased the ability to overclock to 450 a few years back) and it took overnight to get everything downloaded, installed, and compiled. The machine has 192MB RAM in it and is running Fluxbox as the WM...X applications actually have a decent load time and Firefox runs great.

[cyrillic]

I've done this on a very similar laptop. It has been awhile however, the key is to use a lighter glibc.

I run Gentoo on my home router with 64MB of RAM (and no swap).

Up until about a month ago, I was using uclibc, but it was frustrating because more and more of the recent packages would not compile.

Now I am running glibc-2.6 (I tweaked the ebuild to compile with -Os instead of -O2), and overall memory consumption went from 8MB with uclibc to 10MB with glibc.

So in my opinion, using uclibc is not worth the effort, unless you are trying to run a really stripped down system with 8MB of RAM or less.

[NeddySeagoon]

dolphinling,

Put the laptop drive in a more capable x86 box and install for the laptop in the normal way.
You can borrow /usr/portage from the host by bind mounting it inside the chroot.

If moving the drive is too much trouble, make a chroot in a file on a more capable box and install for the laptop there.
Borrow the hosts /usr/portage is you wish but set the laptops packagedir somewhere in the chroot.
This will give you a set of binaries in the laptop packagedir that you can install with emerge -K onto the laptop, ans an install you can tar up and move over like a stage3. You will have to install grub on the MBR normally.

[bunder]

i have a thinkpad 570, which runs a p2-333 with 128mb RAM. all the compiling is done on my distcc server... except for gcc, which i can only compile without xorg running... you should be able to do the same if you have another linux machine handy.

cheers

[PaulHindt]

Scratch that last post...I switched the Compaq Armada 300mhz over to Gentoo & now it is a dedicated Folding @ Home box. Sweet. Put those old boxen to good usez!

[koenderoo]

Oh joy!

Put those old boxen to good usez!

Ever thought about the enviromental influence these old boxen have?
Almost all of these old laptops and workstations have old power supplies which work very inefficient. They consume more power then you would expect.

Think about that and stop the nonsense please. Do you really think that your contribution to Folding @ Home is that high that it will counter the effects of your pc on the environment and ozon layer?