Gentoo on a 486 laptop with 12Meg memory

Message

ragdon · Post by **ragdon** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 11:46 am

Hi,
Has anyone had any success in installing gentoo onto a 486 with hardly any memory, and only a 120Meg HDD?

kernelsensei · Post by **kernelsensei** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 11:54 am

the guys who tried haven't finished the installation yet, they still compiling

More seriously, I think that 12Mo RAM isn't enought to compile the softwares, and with 120Mo HDD, you even don't have enought place for the distfiles ...

If you want to try, do it and let us know if it worked

KozmoNaut · Post by **KozmoNaut** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 12:04 pm

I think Slackware or even LFS would be a better choice here. 120MB HDD is not even near enough for Gentoo.

dontremember · Post by **dontremember** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 12:06 pm

ragdon wrote:Hi,
Has anyone had any success in installing gentoo onto a 486 with hardly any memory, and only a 120Meg HDD?

Not exactly, but I was thinking of loading up an K6-II 450. OK, so it's substantially faster than yer average 486, but it would still take a long time. So far, I've had some success with building a LiveCD from Scratch. I've got an image that'll boot off the CD, but eventually I'll load up it's hard disk.

csherrmann · Post by **csherrmann** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 3:50 pm

well, I tried to get something on my 486 with 36meg ram and 512mb harddrive... ended up in slackware

and even an slackware installation took a long long time...

gustafson · Post by **gustafson** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 5:23 pm

Maybe try Damn Small Linux. Allthough... I think it requires 200MB for hard drive install.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

PS Similar question on: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-34 ... ight-.html.

KozmoNaut · Post by **KozmoNaut** » Wed Jun 08, 2005 6:09 pm

Well, Linux will run in 12MB of ram. 2.2 will just fine, 2.4 OK and I don't know about 2.6.

The killer is the 120MB HDD, though... You ain't gonna fit much stuff on thar, boy

GNUtoo · Post by **GNUtoo** » Fri Jun 10, 2005 1:34 pm

i don't understand why people want to compile on the target machine with such slow machine...
compile it under another machine(if you have one)
you have the folowing options:
-cross compiling
-sharing the folders to compile over a network(./configure with your laptop,make with a faster computer,install with your laptop )
-using cluster tools for making another computer compile files

i've not tried any of theses solutions but i'll try them later...for a p166
i am also searching ultra-light windows managers
i haven't tried opiex86
have someone experienced it on any machine(x86,others)
is it as a normal linux(for example i've experienced Qtopia and it's definitely not an option because of a too restrictive environement that makes incompatible the use of ./configure make make install because of the lack of permisions of exucuting files out of the /dev/shm/Qtopia/bin/ folder and the problem of read-only part of the filesystem)

has your notebook the ethernet or have you some connections cable (null modem,parallel,serial...)
has it a cd-rom(the p166 reads only cd-r lol)
what you'll use it for
-as a notebook
-as a desktop computer(so you could have some hdd space over the network)

brendaniabbatis · Post by **brendaniabbatis** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 12:52 am

I have Gentoo on my P100 laptop with 40mb ram. Compiling is fine with distcc. I have also used 'emerge -K' after compiling binaries on another system. Granted I have a larger hard drive than 200mb, but the Portage tree and sources can easily be on an NFS share. I wonder what you do on Gentoo Linux with only 200mb, but if you know what you want to do and that that is enough space for it, do it.

Redhatter · Post by **Redhatter** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 4:32 am

glibc will need a good couple of GB to compile.

Hate to say it... but I'd say you're up for a bigger 2.5" hard drive for that laptop.
I'd suggest going for at least 4GB, and allocate a good 1GB or so to swap space.

ian! · Post by **ian!** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 12:32 pm

Moved from Gentoo on Alternative Architectures to Gentoo Chat.

TrueDFX · Post by **TrueDFX** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 1:29 pm

Redhatter wrote:glibc will need a good couple of GB to compile.

With nptlonly (-nptl -nptlonly should work too), no -fomit-frame-pointer in CFLAGS, and userlocales and a stripped down /etc/locales.build (not sure if the last two have a large effect on disk space requirements), I didn't notice it using more than about 300-400 MB. Though, in case it uses a lot of large temporary files when I didn't catch that: I had about 700 MB available. It's still plenty more than 120 MB, but there's no need for multiple GBs.

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Sun Jun 12, 2005 1:54 pm

ragdon,

Put Smoothwall on it and use it as a firewall/router.

brendaniabbatis · Post by **brendaniabbatis** » Mon Jun 13, 2005 4:41 pm

Redhatter wrote:glibc will need a good couple of GB to compile.

Hate to say it... but I'd say you're up for a bigger 2.5" hard drive for that laptop.
I'd suggest going for at least 4GB, and allocate a good 1GB or so to swap space.

Who me? I said more than 200mb. My laptop has 15gb... but not all for Gentoo Linux. It's got a little collection of OS's bootable on it. There's enough room for each.

electrofreak · Post by **electrofreak** » Mon Jun 13, 2005 5:54 pm

Redhatter wrote:glibc will need a good couple of GB to compile.

Hate to say it... but I'd say you're up for a bigger 2.5" hard drive for that laptop.
I'd suggest going for at least 4GB, and allocate a good 1GB or so to swap space.

2GB HDs work fine too. My P-MMX 200Mhz laptop only has a 2gb HD and stuff fits just fine on it. (With my sweet clean-up skills that is. You know, deleting distfiles, watching log sizes, blah blah blah.)

FGA · Post by **FGA** » Mon Jun 13, 2005 6:20 pm

I've build a gentoo system for a pentium 133 with 32mb ram. But I'm not so crazy, I did it on a chroot on my athlon64 and then copy all to the pentium's harddisc via ethernet. Of course a "linux32 chroot" so it thinks it's a 32bit system.

But for a 486 12mb....I think LinuxFromScratch is a good idea, but on a faster system.

brendaniabbatis · Post by **brendaniabbatis** » Tue Jun 14, 2005 5:14 pm

You know, this thread raises a good point. I am using this weak laptop for dev of Gen/2, and if I am to use distcc for compiling I'll need to put together cross-compilers on my Linux cluster. I think you're right, Redhatter, Gentoo is best compiled on faster equipment. Looks like I need to set up yet another dev system...

Bellrang QT · Post by **Bellrang QT** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 2:15 am

Systems with these kinds of specs are better suited for trimmed distros. I have a little project I've been working on that I initially wanted to be able to boot from a single floppy. After too many failed floppies, I ended up buying a CF->IDE adapter. Linux and the BIOS think it's a hard drive, though it's really just a 256 MB compact flash card.

I've also played around with a few of the different "tiny" distros. I ended up rolling together by own stuff with Busybox and a vanilla 2.4 kernel. Total disk usaged is a whopping 2 MB at the moment (included kernel and root filesystem image - I gzip an ext2 image that gets mounted at /dev/ram0). The whole thing lives in ram (20 MB total) on a 486-DX2 66 MHz box I have. It's quite a nice little project, and has really helped me learn the ins and outs of Linux (especially early parts of the game like bootloaders and init).

I love Gentoo... but it's place is on my bigger system

PowerFactor · Post by **PowerFactor** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 7:36 am

ragdon wrote:Hi,
Has anyone had any success in installing gentoo onto a 486 with hardly any memory, and only a 120Meg HDD?

I installed gentoo on a 486 12meg with a 2Gb hd. I did the initial compile on another machine though. And even once installed it was just too slow to be useful. And a 120meg hd isn't even close to being enough.

edudlive · Post by **edudlive** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 12:11 pm

I have an old PC (66mhz, 545mb HDD, no clue how much RAM) that was given to me, I never managed to get anything to work though (it didn't support CDboot and DSL didn't have a driver to work with its CD-ROM or something)

I use its HDD for extra swap in my server

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 12:39 pm

edudlive,

That PC will make an excellent firewall, install Smoothwall Express.
If its one of the very early 5v Pentiums, it will be a good heater too.

edudlive · Post by **edudlive** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 12:52 pm

NeddySeagoon wrote:edudlive,

That PC will make an excellent firewall, install Smoothwall Express.
If its one of the very early 5v Pentiums, it will be a good heater too.

I've thought about it, but when I moved out to go to college my mom moved the DSL modem and router from my room to the living room and they don't have room for the PC in there. If I could find another ethernet card around the hosue I may do that to my P2 (using it as a server and firewall at the same time, is that safe?) since it just sits there turned on to see how long it'll stay up

Post by **NeddySeagoon** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 4:11 pm

edudlive,

Its not as safe as a dedicted firewall.
The more things you have on an internet exposed box the greater the probability of an exploitable bug.

edudlive · Post by **edudlive** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 9:05 pm

NeddySeagoon wrote:edudlive,

Its not as safe as a dedicted firewall.
The more things you have on an internet exposed box the greater the probability of an exploitable bug.

Ah, I'll either use it as a firewall, or put Ubuntu on it and sell it as an "internet ready PC"

Vanquirius · Post by **Vanquirius** » Sat Jun 25, 2005 10:10 pm

To reiterate what others have said: compiling in that box is insane. Forget about it. Maybe you can get a reallly trimmed out version of Gentoo to work, but in that case, you might as well install some other distro.

Gentoo on a 486 laptop with 12Meg memory

Gentoo on a 486 laptop with 12Meg memory

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