# If i install gentoo on a PII333 laptop...

## confusion

What kind of performance am i looking at here? I was thinking of picking up an old toshiba tecra or ibm PII 333/366 laptop and throwing gentoo on it (i'd distcc with an athlon 2600XP). All i'd want to use it for is run xfce4, drive a wireless net-card, run mozilla-firebird, gaim/amsn/whatever, and maybe a simple word processor.

Basic on the fly web browsing, communications, and perhaps a little code writing (nothing big).

Reckon it'd run at a decent enough speed? I am of course especially worried about mozilla running too slugishly. Is anybody else running a similar system? Please let me know!

Cheers for the replies people!

-John

----------

## SIR

I have a K6-2 333 MHz with 160 MB RAM.  I don't use a wireless card or an instant messenger, but for web surfing with Mozilla Firefox and using OpenOffice, it works fine.  It just takes a little while to load, that's all.  If you're using distcc, you shouldn't have troubles compiling either.  I'm emerging some KDE packages now, so I get to wait a couple of days!

----------

## confusion

Also, im not well versed with laptops. These old things come with 6gig hard drives. If i pick up a 2.5" 10-20gig HD would it be simple enough to swap in?

-John

----------

## dreas

I would say it's easier than swapping a desktop PC 3.5" HD.

I recommend to go with an old IBM Thinkpad, like a 600e, 390e or 770x. The 600e is pretty thin, the 770x pretty thick and more for the desktop use. I just chose a T20 though for the integrated network card (mini-PCI) mainly and of course the P3 with SpeedStep technology.

Try to max out the RAM on the laptop and you should do pretty fine even with just 300MHz. And RAM should be easy to install as well.

----------

## confusion

Sounds like a plan dreas. Think ill start shopping.   :Cool: 

Actually, im liking the look of these T20's. Some of them have good buy it now prices on ebay. I'll see how much money i have to spare at the end of april.

Thanks again,

-John

----------

## SIR

I've got a 6 GB drive on my laptop.  It came with a 4 or 5 GB drive with Windows originally, but it died and I got it replaced a couple of years ago.  I'm not sure about throwing in a larger drive, maybe I was just cheap at the time, or maybe there was some sort of BIOS limitation....

Anyway, if you're worried about space, you probably won't need the 512 MB swap partition as is shown in the installation docs.  I've never noticed myself using more than 20 MB or so.  This is running X, a simple app or two, and emerging something big.  I do most of my emerging while I'm asleep (especially for big packages) so it may use more.  But, as I said, I've never noticed (some of the "big packages" include X and KDE).  And, if you're going to be using distcc on your athlon xp, it will probably use even less swap.  I don't know what a good value is to set, I was just using the "memory times two" formula, and then figured 512 wasn't too much more, and I knew I'd be doing quite a bit of compiling.

Good luck.

----------

## dreas

 *confusion wrote:*   

> Sounds like a plan dreas. Think ill start shopping.  
> 
> Actually, im liking the look of these T20's. Some of them have good buy it now prices on ebay. I'll see how much money i have to spare at the end of april.
> 
> Thanks again,
> ...

 

Yeah, I think the T20 are awesome. And while a 600e with a P2-366MHz 13" 10GB HD, DVD and without LAN costs about 333 Euros, the T20 offers a lot more for "just" 499 Euros - P3-700MHz SpeedStep 14", 12GB and integrated LAN. I think that's worth it so I went for the T20 even though money is quite an issue for me, hehe.

Btw, these prices are from a german (online) store selling used notebooks with a 12-month waranty. I think they're shipping EU/worldwide so if you're interested in checking them out, just drop me a note.

----------

## confusion

 *dreas wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Yeah, I think the T20 are awesome. And while a 600e with a P2-366MHz 13" 10GB HD, DVD and without LAN costs about 333 Euros, the T20 offers a lot more for "just" 499 Euros - P3-700MHz SpeedStep 14", 12GB and integrated LAN. I think that's worth it so I went for the T20 even though money is quite an issue for me, hehe.
> 
> Btw, these prices are from a german (online) store selling used notebooks with a 12-month waranty. I think they're shipping EU/worldwide so if you're interested in checking them out, just drop me a note.

 

I'd be interested in checking that site out, is it german only or is there an english translation? 

Cheers,

-John

----------

## dreas

Check your PMs in a sec...

----------

## RemcoNL

This may depend on the brand, but the 2 notebook computers I've opened were very hard to open without a manual (which can be found online), so you know what screws to take out to access what part of the hardware  :Smile: 

XFCE4 (with ROX as background?) should run just find on any PII, I still use it on a (desktop) PII 266 (compiled everything from stage 1 without distcc), with 160 Mb EDO ram... Starting Firefox, or especially OpenOffice, is slow, but for the rest it works fine.

Good luck  :Smile: 

----------

## linuxDan

I am running Gentoo on a Toshiba Tecra 8000 which is a PII 366Mhz machine. I have some random amount of ram ( because of upgrades) over 100 MB though. My machine runs great, as far as performance is concerned. I only have two issues left. The hardware clock doesn't seem to  progress time, which might be a dead CMOS battery, and I can't seem to get sound working.  So the speed of the machine is deffinitly viable but you might want to be careful about using a tecra 8000. Make sure you checkout Linux on Laptops .http://www.linux-laptop.net to see what can be done with a particular model of laptop.

Good Luck

----------

