# Gentoo in Pentium II 300MHZ... Possible?

## pmatos

Is it possible to install gentoo in a Pentium II 300 MHZ for a full user desktop pc. Will gnome run in it?

Cheers,

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## Cqwense

Possible yes, fast ... doubtfull. 

I run a server on a p2 400, and with a kde vnc session, i dont find it to be too slow, but i've never tried desktopping on it (exstensive web browsing, flash, movies etc ).  You may want to research other window managers ( my personal favorite is blackbox ) , that, or research the DO_NOT_COMPILE options ( I know theres a post here on the forums for this procedure with kde, will look for a gnome one though).  its pretty self explanitory, and is a nice way of excluding pakages you dont want, even if they are listed as dependancies for gnome.

Also know that if you plan to install via a stage 1, you are looking at a good 2 maybe 3 days worth of compile time.  Gentoo isnt always the fastest to install linux, but i've found that with a little patience comes a lot of reward.

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## ctford0

depends more on the other hardware.  If you have around 256 megs of ram, then yes gnome should run.  I have an office mate running kde 3.2 on a p2 300.  I think he has 256 megs of ram and a 64 meg nvidia card.  Having a nice video card can make all the difference.

chris

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## Rainmaker

hmmm, I thought one of the complaints about X was that it didn't use enough of the GPU / videocard capabilities. Therefor, a good video card shouldn't make that much difference.

RAM does make a difference though, as does the speed of your disks (although I don't think you have ultra-wide scsi 2 in a P300)

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## HydroSan

I had Gentoo running with XFCE4 on a P-II 233MHz with 128MB of RAM.

It's possible.

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## drescherjm

Yes. We have a few 233 Mhz P2s running gentoo and X windows with Kde. I believe we have 128 MB of memory on these though...

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## ctford0

 *Rainmaker wrote:*   

> hmmm, I thought one of the complaints about X was that it didn't use enough of the GPU / videocard capabilities. Therefor, a good video card shouldn't make that much difference.

 

Well, I'm not saying it gives you a huge system speed increase, but when you are forced to run 800x600 at 16 bit color the desktop experience isn't that great.

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## bennettp

I used to run redhat(7.3) on an old pentium 120. Fluxbox started up in under 2 seconds, but kde took over 2 minutes to start (it was promptly uninstalled).

Gentoo should be ok if you set up distcc first, otherwise you might want to use binary packages (at least for glibc).

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## bennettp

Oh and it might be a good idea to use -Os for your cflags. This will make everything smaller (and use less cache=faster!)

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## Rainmaker

I totally forgat to post my experience  :Razz: 

I have gentoo running on my laptop, a 233 Mhz Dell Latitude with 32 Megs of RAM

I run enlightenment, although gnome is installed (but takes about 10 minutes to start, it has to swap like crazy)

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## HydroSan

 *bennettp wrote:*   

> Oh and it might be a good idea to use -Os for your cflags. This will make everything smaller (and use less cache=faster!)

 

Actually, I have seen benchmarks for older computers that -Os actually slows down the binaries significantly.

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## ctford0

 *HydroSan wrote:*   

> Actually, I have seen benchmarks for older computers that -Os actually slows down the binaries significantly.

 

the point of using -Os is to make the binaries smaller, ie. faster loading and use less memory (maybe??).  Of course with less optimization cpu intensive programs will run slower, but I'd doubt that anyone would be encoding mp3's on a 300 MHz P2.  :Smile: 

chris

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## pmatos

This is for my brothers Home PC. He's running WinXP and it is really really slow... I can almost bet the even gnome won't run slower... right?

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## bennettp

 *ctford0 wrote:*   

>  *HydroSan wrote:*   Actually, I have seen benchmarks for older computers that -Os actually slows down the binaries significantly. 
> 
> the point of using -Os is to make the binaries smaller, ie. faster loading and use less memory (maybe??).  Of course with less optimization cpu intensive programs will run slower, but I'd doubt that anyone would be encoding mp3's on a 300 MHz P2. 
> 
> chris

 

That's exactly what I meant. If you have copious amount of hdd and memory, -Os may not be what you want. (My old computer had 800MB hdd and 64MB RAM, so I used -Os to maximise free disk space, and minimise swapping).

And btw, I DID do mp3 encoding on the old computer -- but I compiled lame using -O2 instead of -Os. It could do a full cd overnight!!!  :Very Happy: 

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## Remorse_Of_Nero

Thatll be fine Im sure

I installed kde on my girlfriends PII 300 and it ran very bad but removed and put on fluxbox and gnome-panel  and it runs a tad slow compared to mine (XP2800 ) but its fine.... 

Oh yeah and if your low on memory make sure you put the swap in the middle of the drive.(on average the middle of the dirve is closer to everywhere else !!!!). It should be fine with fluxbox though cos it runs in very little mem anyway

And i would use -Os flags like other peole say. I first emerged her computer with -O2 but a little slow loading off the drive but reemerging it all with -Os makes it much smoother. But she just uses Firefox all the time though so not that cpu intensitve

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## radonsg

well if u feel that gnome consume too much system resouce for u, then u can try xfce4 then. Xfce4 also build upon gtk and compartible with gnome apps & components but consume much less resources.

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## pactoo

Celeron 333 (366?) with 256MB Ram @800x600x16: Runs pretty acceptable with KDE. So it most likely would be with gnome, too.

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## Zepp

```
default@adelie default $ cat /proc/cpuinfo 

processor       : 0

vendor_id       : GenuineIntel

cpu family      : 6

model           : 5

model name      : Pentium II (Deschutes)

stepping        : 2

cpu MHz         : 300.817

cache size      : 512 KB

fdiv_bug        : no

hlt_bug         : no

f00f_bug        : no

coma_bug        : no

fpu             : yes

fpu_exception   : yes

cpuid level     : 2

wp              : yes

flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr

```

Yup it's possible  :Smile: . That is my family machine it's running gentoo linux with gentoo-dev-sources and gnome. It isn't really that slow, no complaints to speed compared to old win2k from family soo  :Razz: 

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## Admiral LSD

I run Gentoo as a server on a P2 450 here, it's not super fast but it gets the job done. Not running X or any kind of WM/DE (over kill for a server anyway) helps a lot though.

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## Zepp

oh forgot to mention ram on that comp is only 256meg of sdram too.

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## dr slizer

Not a Gentoo expirence, but a Debian experience.

When I and a friend worked on setting up a OpenMosix cluster as a project in school we installed X and Fluxbox on the fastest node. A  Pentium II 300MHz with 128MB RAM. There were no problems at all running fluxbox in it, although it could be bit slow when many pages where open in Mozilla. So using a more lightweight browser would be good if you don't have much RAM.

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## carpman

I run gentoo on p2 333 laptop with 192mb ram. I use xfce4,fluxbox,windowsmaker and it runs fine, even use a couple of kde apps that a bit longer to load but work fine. I use 02 but may try 0s.

I have even installed gentoo on 233/128mb and it ran ok with fluxbox.

Showed my laptop to xp user who has 800 p3 with 256mb and he was very impressed with the speed and how much faster i could load apps and move windows about  :Smile: 

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## malv

I installed gentoo on a PentiumPro 200MHz with 128MB of ram and a 200Gb hd.

I use distcc in order to have a fast 2.8GHz P4 help compliling.

I don't know about gnome, but I managed to install kde from the binary CD. I guess compliling this would have been almost insane. I plan to switch to gnome but haven' t tried with the new 2004.2 binary CD. I also can run MySQL and PyQt/eric3 on it. For many things, response time is quite acceptable.

I mainly use this system as a backup for my other computers via shfs.

malv

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## rbr28

Linux will run fine on a P2, it's all in how you configure it.  I have installed linux on a P133 with 32MB and run Xfce on it with no problem.  Sure, I'm also used to running it on high-end servers, and 3Ghz+ desktops, and it's not the same experience, but it works for what you would likely use it for on such systems.Last edited by rbr28 on Sun Aug 15, 2004 10:39 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## Nuuul

Sure it will  :Smile: 

In fact, I'm posting this message on a PII 366Mhz (tecra laptop).

It used to be a 266, but I swapped the cpu and increased RAM (big difference).

Installed it from stage1.

Call me nuts, but I spend last week running Acovea (scripts to determine the best CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS for your architecture), and with good results.

Running XFCE on top of X also, too sloppy with gnome/kde for me.

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## tsunam

About to go to bed so this'll be very quick.

My very first install of Gentoo is and still is on a p3 500, not much better then a pentium 2  300 or so. Sure It does take a while to compile things...2 days for x and kde at that time. It was a learning experience though and once it was up and running it does what I need it to do, without any really noticalble lag. Now my laptop is blazing compared to it.

I'm gong to be reinstalling the p3 500 soon from scratch since I've learned so much in the year since I installed it and want to have it be a nice clean properly configured stage 1 installer (I did stage 3 initially). Using Distcc to help you compile will also make it a lot less painful.

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