Installing on real hardware with bad specs

[lemonisclown]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

[lars_the_bear]