Packard Bell 120MHz & Athlon XP 2500 1.8GHz

[macawgumbo]

I have two computers, Athlon XP 2500 and Packard Bell 120MHz, both of which are going to run Gentoo Linux. I have installed Gentoo on the Athlon from Stage1 and am debating where to go to get a full blown system similar to my windows box. Anyways, my Packard Bell has 2 Hard Drives in it. A 1.2GB and 2GB. The 1.2GB drive (master) will house the boot and swap partitions along with a data partition. The whole 2GB drive is the root partition. I got an error while bootstrapping for like 2 days so now I am installing at Stage2. Will the 2GB be enough to compile the system, kernel, X, GNOME (or other window manager) and other smaller programs? I don't want Portage's temp directory filling up and causing errors in the compile and it failing after wasting a few days. Also, my Athlon XP is dual booting with Windows 2000 Professional and I need a list of programs that compare (if not better than) all the windows programs such as openoffice; MS Office 2000. This is so I can have a fully functional system. Frontends for CUPS Configuration is nice too. In addition, the syntax to add X (or anything for that matter) to runlevel 5 instead of default (3). Thanks in advance. I am progressing from a n00b, but enjoy this stuff immensely.

My 2 cents are that Gentoo is great for learning the inner workings. Since school is out for the summer, I have been playing with Gentoo for a work now and absolutely love it! By the way, distros like FC2 suck in the way of customization and control. It just isn't fun clicking a few buttons and seeing the whole thing install. Gentoo is fun!

[hardcore]

A 2GB root partition may be enough for the base system, however you'd really be pushing the limits of your system with gnome and X compiles. A mozilla compile would definately run you out of space and error out.

[dhurt]

If you need more space and have some spare space on your desktop machine you can set up a NFS share and point your portage tmp drive to that network mount point. Just a warning, you need to have a good, stable and fast connection between the two computers. Also you may look at setting up distcc between the two computers and having your desktop compile every thing. That is how I built my base system for my p-pro router with a 2 Gig drive. No X system on it though, but using Distcc saved years on the compile time.
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