# gentoo on 486???

## Matt2000

I know, in the x86 installation guide is written that you need at least 64 mb ram and a pentium to compile gentoo, but I guess these are the minimum hardware requirements, when using the gentoo-cd. So here's my plan: Create a bootable floppy disk, with network support, d/l the gentoo tarball, create a rather huge swap partition(the 486 machine has only 24 mb ram) and then start compiling the same way, as you would do when using the cd. Has anbody ever tried to do this, or does anyone see any problems that can occur when building the system(which will take around one week I guess), Thx in advance for any help, greets Matt

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## reverius42

 *Matt2000 wrote:*   

> I know, in the x86 installation guide is written that you need at least 64 mb ram and a pentium to compile gentoo, but I guess these are the minimum hardware requirements, when using the gentoo-cd. So here's my plan: Create a bootable floppy disk, with network support, d/l the gentoo tarball, create a rather huge swap partition(the 486 machine has only 24 mb ram) and then start compiling the same way, as you would do when using the cd. Has anbody ever tried to do this, or does anyone see any problems that can occur when building the system(which will take around one week I guess), Thx in advance for any help, greets Matt

 

There isn't any reason to use a floppy disk (unless I'm missing something)... all the CD does is boot (el-torito) the Gentoo floppy image, and the filesystem on it contains the tarballs.

I guess maybe the kernel in the CD image doesn't boot on a 486?

Otherwise the plan sounds good, although excruciatingly painful and slow  :Wink: 

Sure you don't want to use a different distribution aimed at low-end hardware?

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## meyerm

I think he will need a floppy since those old computers often have problems with booting from CD. My compaq P-166 still can't do it.

But to be honest: compiling a whole distri on a 486? A week is not enough... And 24 MB? Well, a month is not enough (if it will work...)  :Wink: 

You should really consider compiling on another machine and putting the results on your 486. For comparison: My Dual-PIII-XEON 550 with 512 MB RAM and complete U2W-harddisks took almost 2 days to compile everything I wanted (ok; X, KDE, OpenOffice and the one or other pause -- but you got the point).

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## Al Dente

To give you what you are in for I have a Pentium MMX 166 with 128 MB of RAM with a slowish 2GB IDE disk.  The bootstrap.sh took hours to run and the "emerge system" took about 24 hours to complete.  The kernel took hours to build and because of a few false assumptions on my part I had to rebuild it a few times before I had a fully functional system.  I started to build KDE but in the second day I killed it since I was planning on using Xfce anyway.

If you have any spair change I recommend upgrading before the install.  I notice Surplus Computers http://www.softwareandstuff.com/ has a PII 350/64MB/6GB system for $159.  Assuming you will pick up a little more RAM you could have a much more reasonable system for about $200.\

Your query about '486 does peak my interest.  I feel like finding an old '486 or even '386 to see just how long the install can take as a worst case senerio.

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## kraylus

i disagree with the suggestion of buying a really nice computer just to run linux. besides, isn't this what linux boats? the capability of running on any kind of machine, even the ancient and never-used 486?

of course!!

a 486 makes a great network file server or even a small web host. i find it ludicrous that this person be ridiculed for requesting a boot disk. i myself have a compaq p75 and it cannot boot from the cd-rom either. i don't have the time or resources to hook this computer up to my home network and jump through hoops just to get gentoo running on it.

i think that a boot floppy is a great idea.

whoever it was that suggested he build the distro on a faster machine was a valid one though. i built my gentoo install on a p233 with 128mb ram. god, that was awful. imagine on a 486??

but... how would we go about doing this? i would LOVE to get rid of slackware on my 486 in exchange for gentoo, but at the moment, i don't see any painless ways to do that.

ryan

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## phong

I think it can certainly be done, and I don't think it's as absurd as people think.  tomsrtbt would be an excellent choice for the boot disk (though you may want to trim it down some if you know what you're doing, for the sake of saving you memory).  I'm also guessing the compile will take less time than you think - the compiler has fewer optimizations and less work to do on an older processor.  For example, IIRC the 486 isn't superscalar at all so the instruction scheduler doesn't have to do much of anything.  You can also selectively turn down the optimizations some to speed things up - a lot of them won't benefit an old processor as much (if at all).  The difference in compile time between -O levels is easily noticeable, and could be a big win on a pokey machine (both in CPU time and memory usage).

Likewise, turn off lots of USE options to install as few optional bits as possible and speed up the install.  If you're careful, you could also tweak the default profile so fewer packages get installed with 'emerge system'.

For comparison, installed a fairly default installation of Gentoo on a P133 with 64M of ram and 128M of swap.  I did the bootstrap before going home for the day - it was long since done the next morning.  The 'emerge system' finished just in time to get the kernel compile started before the end of the day.  The whole process from start to finish was about 2 days, but would have been probably just like 24-30 hours of actual time for the computer "working".  I bet you could get your 486 up and running in less than 5 days if you don't have to start over at any point.

Old hardware is great for headless boxen to do various useful functions (cd jukebox, controlling your house, low volume file serving, distributed computing, etc.)

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## pjp

Al Dente

I like it

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## syadnom

build the system on some other machine, just set the system for i386 in make.conf and make sure your kernel is for i386 too, i dont believe their are any 486 optimizations that you can do that are any better than 386 ones.  

also, i dont beleive you need to bootstrap and build the system from scratch, isn't the setup on a stage3 install for 386? that would make them the choice ones to have.

also, if your running X, i would think about going with a 3.x version, in my experience the 3.3.6 is faster on a slower machine..

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## syadnom

just pull the drive out, and install it in a much faster machine.  make sure your use flags are set right and your processor is i386 in make.conf and then you can build your entire system.  you build the kernel for the hardware your currently on and then build another kernel for the target machine.  when everything finishes you can put the drive back in the old computer and try to fire it up.  you may need to go in with a tomsrbt or some other linux-on-floppy disk and make any necessary changes but the system will be built and installed.  

like phong said, i386 is VERY easy to compile for.  on an athlon 1800+ system you could most likely build you entire system in under 5 hours.    

my XP1800+ builds my system in 10 or so.

good luck if your still trying, this post is a little late  :Smile: .

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## flickerfly

 *Quote:*   

> syadnom said:
> 
> just pull the drive out, and install it in a much faster machine.
> 
> 

 

What if it's a notebook HD.  Is there any way I can hook this up to a normal PC?  I don't have a faster notebook, let alone one with 2HD capability.  This would allow me to finally recycle my 486 Toshiba Satelite.  

That was a great computer back in the day...

Thanks

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## guero61

It's doable; I've done one of the "little boy" installs on a P-100 with 24MB of RAM.  It just takes an extremely long time to compile everything.  Go for it, it'll be the best way to squeeze every last little bit of juice out of that processor.  Tomsrtbt is the way I went, as my machine couldn't boot a CD.  Good luck!

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## caefer

hmm.. I wonder why I should set my make.conf and the kernel to i386 when it is supposed to run on a 486dx? what could possibly happen when I set everything to 486??

/christian

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## syadnom

their are adapters for standard IDE to mini-IDE for ~10$.  the mini IDE is identical in pinnout except for size and the four additional pins on the right side are for power.

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## flickerfly

 *syadnom wrote:*   

> their are adapters for standard IDE to mini-IDE for ~10$.  the mini IDE is identical in pinnout except for size and the four additional pins on the right side are for power.

 

Thanks, that is what I was hoping to hear.  For 10$ it would be worth it.

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## rauar

Hey, actually u could setup, install and compile your 486 stuff on a dedicated partition and transfer the image with "dd if=/dev/dedicatedpart of=imageFile" and transfer the image via network to your laptop.  so you don't have to connect any harddisks to a different computer.

Anyway i tried to compile with 386 explicitly set in make.conf. but i noticed that the 02=i686 flag quite often during the compilation even when the optimization flags were commented. is this ok or is there are problem with scripts/bootstrap.sh and old processors ?

Cheerz Al

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## flickerfly

 *rauar wrote:*   

> Hey, actually u could setup, install and compile your 486 stuff on a dedicated partition and transfer the image with "dd if=/dev/dedicatedpart of=imageFile" and transfer the image via network to your laptop.  so you don't have to connect any harddisks to a different computer.

 

That's an excellent  suggestion.  Now I just need to dig up a PCMCIA NIC.  (The one it used to use got fried years ago.)

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## FormerSlacker

I think a 486 would make a great firewall/router/file server for a smallish network. In fact, I am using one myself. Its a little 486SX 33mhz, 12mb of ram and a 60mb drive (Yes you've read that correctly  :Smile: )

Personally, I think compiling a system from scratch on a 486 is just asking for trouble. I'm sure it can be done, but whats the point? If hard drive space is an issue, I'd reccomend slackware. I was able to fit slack with network utils, apache and samba in about 30 megs, without gcc of course.

My little 486 has been serving me well for over a year now, with about 2 reboots inbetween for software upgrades. All hail obsolete hardware!  :Laughing: 

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## Spida

I have Gentoo on a p-75 Notebook with 14mb ram. I originally installed with the harddisk in my desktop machine (1,2ghz amd) with the notebook hd hooked up with an adaptor (available in better shops for about 5$) to my desktop machine.

In the winter-holidays, I updated the system running on its own. That took almost 3 weeks.

Alternatives are using distcc (distributed-c-compiler) or preparing the system on another disk and transfering it over.

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## bumpus

I've done this. It took me about a week and a half from first boot to finishing the emerge system, but it came out OK. Eventually, I even got courier-imap, apache and squirrel mail running on it. I wouldn't exactly recommend that situation though. Squirrel mail was unbearably slow. Apache worked fine for static content though. Samba worked pretty well too.

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## tecknojunky

My 2¢

I had my 486-DX33 wt 8MO running Fressco for a router and added Apache, proftpd, samba, print server, qmail, squid and maybe a few others that I forget.  A 486 runs Linux great as long as it is used for services.  I never even imagined getting X in there.

I upgraded that system to a P1 when I tried running Perl (interpreter) in there.  Just to heavy.

After succesfully installing Gentoo on a Celeron box, I tried installing it on my 486.  I finally opted to slot the drive in my Celeron box and compile the system with 386 flags.  Once sloted back into the 486, it worked like a charm.

But Gentoo's Python base tools makes it not well suited for low-end machines.  Emerge sync takes almost 2 hours to complete.  Reboot (from prompt to prompt) takes about 15 minutes.  Emerge -up world takes 10 minutes to simply list the packages to install.  Because of python, it's not enjoyable.

I tried distcc but i have yet to make it work.  One other thing I did which is much more efficient was to do a nfs mount of the 486 partition into the Celeron and then chroot to it.  After a env-update + sourse /etc/profile, it's like if the 486's Gentoo was using the Celeron.  Only catch is that the /dev does not nfs mount (yet to do further testing with that).

One last thing I'm very incline to try (when i'll have time) is OpenMosix to create a cluster with all my boxes.

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