Gentoo on a P75/32MB?

[Jyrinx]

I've got two Linux boxes in my home: my main one, and a masquerading firewall. Both run Red Hat 7.2. I'm getting sick of tweaking stuff on RH ... Gentoo sounds yummy.

However, the firewall is a Pentium-75 with 32MB of RAM, which is just dandy for the job, but the Gentoo installation recommends 64MB, and I can't use the stage3 stuff because it's not a 686 proc ... is it possible to use my real 'pooter (an Athlon XP system) to give the bootstrapping a headstart? Are there instructions for this?

(An added wrinkle is that GCC (both 3.0.4 and 2.96) is rather broken on the main box (hence my abandonment of Red Hat ...), so my current (rather vague) idea is somehow to start the process by booting the main box from the Gentoo CD, compiling some stuff, then burning the intermediate state to a CD so the firewall box can take over ... is this halfway sane?)

Jyrinx
jyrinx@mindspring.com

[dArkMaGE]

i suppose if you booted from the gentoo cd, set your compilation settings in make.conf to something appropriate for your low end machine (dont try to compile for an i686), unti you get to stage3... tar everything up into one nice file, and then use the instructions for installing from stage3 on your low end box, except youll be using your own custom tarball, and youll be transfering the data over the network instead of by cdrom (im assuming since your box is a firewall it has some sort of network access, right? ) and then go from there...
of course, its 3am and ive never actually tried to do such a thing, but if i were you, thats how id be going about it

[Jyrinx]

OK, sounds good. I'll try it when I get a chance ... this weekend, perhaps. Thanks!

Jyrinx
jyrinx@mindspring.com

[dalei]

unfortunately, you have no chance to boot from gentoo CD created from gentoo-ix86-1.1a.iso because it need 64M memory.

Don't worry. You still can install it, and even do not need floppy or CDROM.

1) make sure your RedHat partition up and running perfectly, with right network connection and disk access. make sure you have >64M swap.
2) create gentoo's partitions.
3) start from Gentoo Linux 1.1a Installation Instructions code listing 14.
4) If you do not have the CDROM, ignore code listing 15 and download the package from
http://www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/releases/build/1.1a/stage1-ix86-1.1a.tbz2
5) Go on from code listing 16.
6) On code Listing 19, make sure you configure correctly. For 32M memory, I assume you don't need fancy X stuff. Here is my USE line in make.conf
USE="-gnome -gtk -X -kde -tcltk -kdm -qt -pdf -java apache php postgresql"
change to what you need.

I am also new to gentoo and just installed it on a P166/32M/2G PC.