Installing on real hardware with bad specs

lemonisclown · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2024 Posts: 6

Hello everyone,

First of all, I'd like to say that I'm still a beginner when it comes to installing Gentoo. I really like the philosophy of this OS, but I'm still struggling on some points, even though my installations have generally gone very smoothly.

As the title suggests, I'll soon be installing Gentoo on real hardware. Every time I've done so, it's been on a virtual machine with pretty good specs (usually 6 cores minimum and 8g ram). This time, the machine will be... Let's say pretty bad. The CPU looks like this:

Intel Pentium D915 Dual Core.

This bad boy has 2 cores/2 threads. Which means I'll have plenty of time to do other things when it starts compiling. As for RAM, I don't know yet, but I'm guessing 1 or 2 GB. As for the hard disk, it'll be HDD, as I don't have any SSDs to spare.

I'm coming to you for help with optimization. Indeed, my use will be limited to C programming. I specify C, because I don't intend to use Rust, for example. What's more, I can get along just fine with tmux and vim, with which I already work very well. Indeed, if RAM is low, I don't think I'll need a graphical interface. Besides, I don't think I'd really want one on this war monster.

I think I'll need help with "make.conf" or maybe even during installation.

Thank you in advance for your future messages,

Lemon.

flysideways · Guru Joined: 29 Jan 2005 Posts: 490

It will be easier if you can manage 2Gb of memory per thread used for compiling. Once the system starts paging the compiles get much longer.

logrusx · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 2419

It might be possible to use the binhost for this. If not, as someone who used to use a slightly newer dual core E6200 with 6GB of RAM and later a quad core Q6600 with 8GB of RAM up until 3 years ago, I'd say get rid of that thing. It's not worth the electricity it'll use.

Check with if it supports the generic x68_64 instruction set with

lemonisclown · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2024 Posts: 6

Hello,

First of all, thanks for your answer. I didn't think at all about electricity use in this case. I mean, I have already an other computer to do my stuff. Ok, it have Debian and W11, but I think i'll wait to get like a thinkpad or something like this to play with Gentoo on real hardware.

Thanks for open my eyes about this, again,

Lemon.

lars_the_bear · Guru Joined: 05 Jun 2024 Posts: 520

As a relative newcomer to Gentoo myself, I have to wonder whether Gentoo is really the right thing for really old hardware. My hardware isn't nearly as old as Pentium, and even mine struggles. You can avoid the compilation burden to some extent by setting the system up so that it can use more binary packages; but that means making compromises that themselves might not suit the kind of minimal installation you'll need for old hardware. There have been some improvements in the binary hosting lately, which mean that some binaries now exist that match the settings on a really minimal installation. Still, I find that I struggle to get much use from the binary host, and I have to compile a lot.

You can also compile for an old machine on a newer one, which is something I've tried. I've found this very fiddly to set up, but maybe I am making some small progress. It's been a long road, however.

My gut feeling is that you probably can run Gentoo on ancient hardware if you're doing it for educational or experimental purposes, and you don't mind how long it takes to compile everything. I think some people do take (perfectly reasonable) pride in being able to keep ancient stuff alive, but I don't think they're using it every day. For a computer that you use every day, and need to keep up to date, I've found the compilation burden overwhelming.

Sadly, I don't think anybody cares much about old PC-type hardware any more. There's more interest in 8-bit computers from the 80s (which I also have) than in old x86. I haven't found anything better than Gentoo for this kind of thing, but it's still pretty painful. If I had known three months ago what I know now, I'm not sure I would have started.

BR, Lars.

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9270

lars_the_bear · Guru Joined: 05 Jun 2024 Posts: 520

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2024 11:11 am Post subject:

Building and running Gentoo can be separated, that's what the binhost does.
You can also run your own binhost, so you get what you want the way you want it.

Don't try to build gcc in only 1G RAM. It won't.
I'm not sure about 2G.
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those that have never had a hard drive fail.

RIA77 · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2016 Posts: 391

lemonisclown · n00b Joined: 14 Sep 2024 Posts: 6

Hello everyone,

I'm sorry for the late reply.

I see that I can transfer the gentoo installation from one machine to another. That's probably the key here. But the fact is that I think if I use this computer, it will be for only a few occasions. Maybe I'd be better off installing it on my main computer and deleting Windows/Debian? I'm not sure yet. I'm also starting to get into kernels and that sort of thing, and Gentoo may be the best choice so far for playing with that.

Thanks again for your answers, between the OS and this community, I'm truly delighted !

eccerr0r · Posted: Tue Sep 24, 2024 11:36 pm Post subject:

Pentium 915 appears to be a Pentium4/Prescott core... Yow. At least it's true dual core and will run 64-bit, but without at least ~ 4GiB RAM, it's not going to help.

I don't think it's a big deal to use these old machines though I've personally gotten rid of all my working P4's. Leaving them on 24/7 doing nothing is probably not a good idea, but just using them for a task and shutting down, not so bad.

I'm still using an DDR2 8GiB X3360 24/7... yes it eats some power, but I don't think it's horrible, then again electricity is fairly cheap where I'm at (~ 12¢/kWh). I was planning to replace it with a newer model, DDR3 16GiB quad core Atom (that doesn't need a fan!) since I have one as spare, but having second thoughts due to how slow it is compared to even the X3360 (the older quad core X3360 is about 3x faster than the quad core Atom!).

--

BTW, currently trying to update my Atom 2GiB 32-bit. It's now officially starting to get hard because llvm and clang are very unhappy with 32-bit and running out of virtual memory space... Unfortunately clang18 is needed to build firefox...
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