# Gentoo on a 7 year old computer

## jamesgecko

I have this computer we got in 1997.

It has 64 Mb ram, a 300 MHz Pentium Celron processor and a 6 Gig Hd. (and, of course, a cdrom drive, floppy disk drive and a network card)

I've tried Debian, and that was too slow. Vector Linux is much faster, but it uses an older version of the Linux kernal and has some problems with my network card. (A Realtek thing, I believe)

I've heard that Gentoo is much faster because everything is compiled for the system on install, but with a computer this slow, I've heard that install could take up to two weeks!

Is this true? Should I even bother trying Gentoo with a computer this old?

edit: MHz, not GHz, lolLast edited by jamesgecko on Mon Nov 15, 2004 8:36 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## SerfurJ

300 ghz??   :Surprised: 

i installed gentoo from stage 1 on a system with a 133 mhz cpu and 32 mb ram.  it took a while, mostly b/c it was swapping to disk most of the glibc build.  distcc helps too.

just don't install X, gtk, qt, or any graphics and it will work fine.

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## FGA

You can put the 6gig hd on a modern pc and do the installation on it. Or use distcc, but it is slower and many ebuilds don't use it

There are a few post in the forums about this. Use the search (I can't tell you too much, I don't speak english)  :Wink: 

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## cluster one

I've a 333mHz P2, and it's actually surprisingly fast, even on Gnome. Try for a Ram upgrade though, it's totally worth the cash.

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## nxsty

Move the harddrive to a faster computer and build the system there!

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## codergeek42

Hey if you can get HL2 to play on a 486, I'm pretty sure you can install Gentoo on your machine  :Wink: 

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## mpsii

Use debian or slackware. Not to knock Gentoo, but it hardly seems worth the effort for a Celery 300.

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## forbjok

I did a full stage1 install on an old P2 233mhz w/ 128MB ram in less than 24 hours. A Celeron 300 should be very much usable with Gentoo on it, though a little more RAM (128MB+) would probably help.

Just don't expect it to run Doom3  :Wink: 

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## black hole sun

'nother vote for slackware. It's really fast on almost all computers, age regardless.

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## John5788

gentoo being compiled from stage1 will definitely benefit the old machine. youll notice a huge difference  :Smile: 

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## squanto

I built Gentoo 1.4a on a 166Mhz Pentium with 96MiB of ram and a 2GiB drive.  Took about 4 days total of compilation time to do a stage one thru hosting websites with apache and serving samba shares.  If you build in another faster computer it won't take too long, or use a later stage.

Also, to keep build times short, use another faster computer to build binary packages and then install them onto the celleron 300.

Definitely doable.  X should even run fairly quick (although take a bit to compile).  I'd avoid trying to do KDE from source on that though.

I know there are probably a 100 threads on this though . . .   :Embarassed: 

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## John5788

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

> Hey if you can get HL2 to play on a 486, I'm pretty sure you can install Gentoo on your machine 

 

you lie, they used HL1...

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## malloc

I vote for either Debian or arch or any other binary distro != fedora && suse

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## Bob P

 *forbjok wrote:*   

> I did a full stage1 install on an old P2 233mhz w/ 128MB ram in less than 24 hours. A Celeron 300 should be very much usable with Gentoo on it, though a little more RAM (128MB+) would probably help.
> 
> Just don't expect it to run Doom3 

 

i did a full stage 1 install on an old P1-133 with 64 MB RAM (maxed out) and boostrapping alone took 3 days!  the rest wasn't too bad... until i emerged x-11.  that took another 2-3 days.  when i was finished, my 4.5 GB hard disk was 85% full and i hadn't even installed a window manager or an e-mail client yet.  

if you're planning on running gentoo on an old boatanchor like this, plan for a full week of non-distributed compile time, and use a much bigger hard disk.

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## tnt

I've run (although I've compiled it on Barton 3000+) Gentoo on Celeron 300A with 320MB of RAM. So, now it serves LAN of some 20 PCs with: Internet connection (default gateway), DNS (simple forwarding), proxy (some 20GB !!! cache), firewall, and rest of 80GB hdd is samba share space... 

Working PERFECTILY and has some realy great uptimes... Gentoo rocks !!!

 :Laughing: 

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## carneboy

 *cluster one wrote:*   

> I've a 333mHz P2, and it's actually surprisingly fast, even on Gnome. Try for a Ram upgrade though, it's totally worth the cash.

 

I can re-iterate this enough.. my old 350mhz became so much more useful after i added 128mb to it.

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## squanto

 *Bob P wrote:*   

> when i was finished, my 4.5 GB hard disk was 85% full and i hadn't even installed a window manager or an e-mail client yet.  

 

Get rid of the source files  :Wink:  saves tons of room, they are unneeded unless you need to recompile the package again, and with compile times in the days, an extra 4 hours on the 56k modem isn't gonna change anything.

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## Bob P

 *squanto wrote:*   

>  *Bob P wrote:*   when i was finished, my 4.5 GB hard disk was 85% full and i hadn't even installed a window manager or an e-mail client yet.   
> 
> Get rid of the source files  saves tons of room, they are unneeded unless you need to recompile the package again, and with compile times in the days, an extra 4 hours on the 56k modem isn't gonna change anything.

 hehe.  i have a DSL connection, so the downloads won't be THAT painful.  but the idea that all of my HD space is occupied by source files is really surprising.  how many megs of source files do you think i could get rid of?  i'm really gonna fly the n00b flag here -- where are they?

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## forbjok

 *Bob P wrote:*   

>  *forbjok wrote:*   I did a full stage1 install on an old P2 233mhz w/ 128MB ram in less than 24 hours. A Celeron 300 should be very much usable with Gentoo on it, though a little more RAM (128MB+) would probably help.
> 
> Just don't expect it to run Doom3  
> 
> i did a full stage 1 install on an old P1-133 with 64 MB RAM (maxed out) and boostrapping alone took 3 days!  the rest wasn't too bad... until i emerged x-11.  that took another 2-3 days.  when i was finished, my 4.5 GB hard disk was 85% full and i hadn't even installed a window manager or an e-mail client yet.  
> ...

 

Never tried a P1-133, but I did a stage1 install on a 166MMX w/ 64MB ram, and i think the whole thing (bootstrap + system) took about a week. I didn't spend that time staring at the screen though, so I don't know exactly how long - just that it was finished by the weekend  :Smile: 

I also tried to do a stage1 install on a 486 (75mhz I think) w/ 16MB ram, but eventually gave up. It probably took about 10 minutes  :Rolling Eyes:  to boot the livecd, and about 1/2 hour to get portage and some temp. build dirs mounted via NFS.. I figured it would take several years to do the actual bootstrap/system compiles. Btw. anyone ever actually gone through with this?

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## Bob P

i have a 486 sitting around that has 64 MB on it.   think that the biggest impediment to doing it on a 486 would be the small size of the supported hard drives.  hard drives from that era are about 350 MB!  just about all of the HD would have to be swap!

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## forbjok

 *Bob P wrote:*   

> i have a 486 sitting around that has 64 MB on it.   think that the biggest impediment to doing it on a 486 would be the small size of the supported hard drives.  hard drives from that era are about 350 MB!  just about all of the HD would have to be swap!

 

True, but putting in a bigger harddrive isn't a problem. It originally had a 650MB drive, but now it has a 1.2GB drive. Not great, but enough to hold a basic Gentoo install w/o local portage tree, and running /var/tmp/portage over NFS.  :Very Happy: 

I have an i386-optimized install on it now, that I compiled on the HDD using an USB IDE controller on another computer, and it runs acceptably *. I'm thinking of recompiling it with "-mtune=i486"... I have a couple of other old computers too, so I want it to be runnable on an i386, but optimized for 486, since most of them are 486's (I currently have 3 486-based boxes i think, 2 of which are currently working, and 5 or 6  486 CPUs lying around - not sure if all are still working though)

* - still takes 10 minutes to boot   :Laughing: 

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## chunderbunny

 *Bob P wrote:*   

>  *squanto wrote:*    *Bob P wrote:*   when i was finished, my 4.5 GB hard disk was 85% full and i hadn't even installed a window manager or an e-mail client yet.   
> 
> Get rid of the source files  saves tons of room, they are unneeded unless you need to recompile the package again, and with compile times in the days, an extra 4 hours on the 56k modem isn't gonna change anything. hehe.  i have a DSL connection, so the downloads won't be THAT painful.  but the idea that all of my HD space is occupied by source files is really surprising.  how many megs of source files do you think i could get rid of?  i'm really gonna fly the n00b flag here -- where are they?

 

Basically you can delete everything in /usr/portage/distfiles (and /usr/src if you don't need to compile a new kernel.) My server shares the portage directory  over my LAN (so I only have to do one emerge sync for 5 computers) and has collected about 2.0GB of files in about 8 months.

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## spacebar

 *jamesgecko wrote:*   

> I've heard that Gentoo is much faster because everything is compiled for the system on install, but with a computer this slow, I've heard that install could take up to two weeks!
> 
> Is this true? Should I even bother trying Gentoo with a computer this old?
> 
> edit: MHz, not GHz, lol

 

yes. in fact, i almost think it's an old PC that can benefit the MOST from a source-based distro such as Gentoo. you can optimize for your hardware, install only what you want/need, run a light DE such as xfce for example,  or rox+yr choice of wm, or fluxbox, or whatever. with the right tools, if done right, i think you'll really notice a difference.

i recently installed from stage1 on a very similar machine. Gateway PII 300, Realtek card, small (tiny!) HD--in fact just a 2 GB partition carved from an existing Windows install. it does have 192 MB of RAM, i would think about adding some RAM if i were you. overally performance will be snappier in the end and i think the install will go quicker. on my system it took most of a weekend. i used distcc which no doubt helped, if you have access to a faster system i would recommend that.

other things to consider:

use some form of optimization with the compiler (CFLAGS -O1,-O2, etc. in make.conf--these will make your compile times much faster)

2.6 kernel (it's not just for SMP machines, seems faster than 2.4 on everything i've tried)

make menuconfig (don't use GENKERNEL unless yr desparate--you will get a lot of crap you don't need!)

GCC 3.4 (specifying ~x86 in ACCEPT_KEYWORDS will get you this by default i think)

delete tarbills from /usr/portage/distfiles/ as you go--if you need the HD space; i would make sure you're happy with the installs first otherwise you have to re-download the source again  :Sad: 

nptl

prelink

be stingy with USE flags (minus everything you don't absolutely need, you can always add it later, -kde -qt -gnome esp.)

(good 'plus' ones to use are userlocales and moznoxft)

umm, there's probably more but that's all i can think of at the moment

some stuff like X11, yes, will take a while but i think you'll be pleased with the results

--D

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## jleejj

I installed 2003.2 on an old dual Pentium Pro 200MHz with 256 MB of RAM.  I think hard drive access slowed the compile time down the most, but it only took around 2 days to compile everything including Xorg.

You really don't want to run Gnome or KDE on a machine that old though.  With a lighter window manager, like FVWM, I boot into a full graphical interface with only around ~22MB of RAM used.  Firefox does tend to eat resources though ...

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## Bob P

i hate to say it, but on something like a 486 or a P133, Windows 98 seems to be a much more lean and mean installation.    :Embarassed: 

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## squanto

 *Bob P wrote:*   

> i hate to say it, but on something like a 486 or a P133, Windows 98 seems to be a much more lean and mean installation.   

 

It all depends.  If you use a Gnome version from 1998, it will run pretty snappy as well, as Gnome was not nearly as big as it is today.  Same with KDE.  (If they were even around in a usable form at that point, I'm young-ish).

I found Gnome to be very usable on that 166 Pentium with RedHat 7's Gnome installed.  Ran Gimp and everything.  Took about  2 minutes and to boot to GDM screen, and about 20 seconds to log in to full usability.  Had it as my main (only) Linux desktop while in High School ( I was a mac person ).

 :Very Happy: 

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## forbjok

 *jamesgecko wrote:*   

> I've heard that Gentoo is much faster because everything is compiled for the system on install, but with a computer this slow, I've heard that install could take up to two weeks! 

 

I seriously doubt it will take a week, unless you start to emerge something humongous like KDE or GNOME during the install. Maybe a day or two at most I would guess, for bootstrapping + emerge system, and the rest is just small stuff like syslog-ng and vixie-cron.

That is, unless you're swapping to a PIO harddrive or something, of course - then it could very well take months.  :Rolling Eyes: 

 *Bob P wrote:*   

> i hate to say it, but on something like a 486 or a P133, Windows 98 seems to be a much more lean and mean installation. 

 

Windows 98 on a 486... why am I not tempted to try that   :Laughing: 

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## xbmodder

use stage 1 worth the wait i don't recomend distcc as it somtimes b0rks...

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## Bob P

 *forbjok wrote:*   

> I seriously doubt it will take a week, unless you start to emerge something humongous like KDE or GNOME during the install. Maybe a day or two at most I would guess, for bootstrapping + emerge system, and the rest is just small stuff like syslog-ng and vixie-cron.
> 
> That is, unless you're swapping to a PIO harddrive or something, of course - then it could very well take months.  

 

in all seriousness, on the wrong hardware a Stage 1 install could easily take a week.   i bootstraped a stage 1 install with NPTL on to a P3-800 this morning.  it took 10 hours just to complete the "bootstrap.sh" script.  the "bootstrap.sh" script on a P133 that i completed earlier this week took (no kidding here) 72+ hours -- and this does NOT include "emerge system" or any of the following steps!

there is no doubt in my mind that to install Gentoo Stage 1-- with NO X-11 and NO wm -- it could easily take 150+hours on that hardware.  add on X11 and something like KDE and you're easily looking at 2 weeks.  add Open Office and you're probably looking at 3 weeks in total.

obvioiusly, unless you're a glutton for punishment, you need to use distributed compling with the aid of distcc and a faster PC.

i'll admit that i'm not too excited about the prospect of running Win98 on an old 486 or a P133, but I'll admit that I do have an old P133 running Windows 98 on a LAN as an e-mail station, and for an app like that a crappy old PC running Win 98 is fine.  after spending an entire week watching that P133 install Gentoo Stage 1, and finding that it choked the life out of a 4.5 GB hard disk, I did something radical -- i stuffed a 1 GB hard disk back in there and put Win 98 and MS Office on it, and had room to spare.

to be fair, its not very reasonable to expect old hardware to run modern apps, USE flags or not!

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## forbjok

 *xbmodder wrote:*   

> use stage 1 worth the wait i don't recomend distcc as it somtimes b0rks...

 

Yep, definitely do a stage 1   :Wink: 

As for distcc, I've never had any problems with it - I think great parts of the bootstrap process will deliberately avoid using it though, so I'm not sure how greatly it will affect the compile time. However, the 'emerge system' would probably speed up quite a bit, and since the Celeron is i686-based (as all x86-based CPUs starting with Pentium Pro, and including AMD ones), it shouldn't be a problem to use a newer computer for distcc server.

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## forbjok

 *Bob P wrote:*   

>  *forbjok wrote:*   I seriously doubt it will take a week, unless you start to emerge something humongous like KDE or GNOME during the install. Maybe a day or two at most I would guess, for bootstrapping + emerge system, and the rest is just small stuff like syslog-ng and vixie-cron.
> 
> That is, unless you're swapping to a PIO harddrive or something, of course - then it could very well take months.   
> 
> in all seriousness, on the wrong hardware a Stage 1 install could easily take a week.   i bootstraped a stage 1 install with NPTL on to a P3-800 this morning.  it took 10 hours just to complete the "bootstrap.sh" script.  the "bootstrap.sh" script on a P133 that i completed earlier this week took (no kidding here) 72+ hours -- and this does NOT include "emerge system" or any of the following steps!
> ...

 

You're right, on the wrong hardware it could definitely take a week. Come to think of it, I probably used distcc when installing my P2 233mhz - but hey, it did finish bootstrapping and system overnight, so I'm not complaining  :Very Happy: 

My ideas of wrong hardware: (that I can think of atm)

* Harddrives that only support PIO mode. (for others make sure they're using DMA before starting any compiling)

* Low memory - you might want to "borrow" some extra memory from another computer for the install process.

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## vonhelmet

A Celeron 300 you say? A lot of them were extremely good at overclocking. Spend £15 (~$20) on a decent heatsink and fan then crank the FSB up to 100MHz and you've got about a 50% increase in speed right there.

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## Jinidog

Old PCs aren't only good for server or terminals.

I've KDE 3.3 running on an K6-II with 450 MHz and 128 MB RAM.

I'll upgrade the RAM, but even with 128 MB it is quite useable.

System is responding quite well, loading times are a bit on the long side.

(Sad is, that the Matrox G200 has 500 kB too less memory for DRI acceleration at 1024x768.)

The system is useable for surfing and chatting.

OpenOffice works, but it never compiled through (so I had to use the binary distribution). march=k6-2 is a little buggy.

You can try a benchmark of the CFLAGS with nbench and will have some interesting results. 

As the best CFLAGS for a Pentium4 and an AthlonXP are totally different, O3 is not faster than O2 on this PC.

Os is still slower than O2.

With the right CFLAGS I noticeably speeded up an new Gentoo installation on this machine in comparison to the one before.

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## pete_ford

 *jamesgecko wrote:*   

> I have this computer we got in 1997.
> 
> It has 64 Mb ram, a 300 MHz Pentium Celron processor and a 6 Gig Hd. (and, of course, a cdrom drive, floppy disk drive and a network card)
> 
> I've heard that Gentoo is much faster because everything is compiled for the system on install, but with a computer this slow, I've heard that install could take up to two weeks!
> ...

 

Well:

My current project is a 433Mhz Celeron, 64Mb, 4Gb disk.

Gentoo from stage 1 has worked pretty well, but it HAS taken about two weeks to get as far as a decent desk top. The initial bootstrap up to stage3 took about a week of leaving it going and checking every so often. I also went truly insane and did 'emerge kde'. That took four days   :Crying or Very sad: 

Still, I originally started with a 133 Pentium MMX and 24Mb. That wasn't going very well, but then my eBay £15 upgrade arrived...   :Smile: 

I was trying to put Gentoo on a 150Mhz laptop, but I got stuck with only having a CD drive OR the floppy (not both, even one after the other) and having a non-standard PCMCIA bus which meant no network...

I might start that again sometime, but probably not with KDE.

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## Bob P

-insert pearl of wisdom here-

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