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johnny37h3r
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Joined: 07 Dec 2004
Posts: 3
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 Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 10:09 pm Post subject: Installing Gentoo on Old Systems |
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I have a little project here...
I have a Compaq Armada 7400 laptop running PII 166mhz 128mb ram. I have debian on it now but I wanna switch it to gentoo after the positive experiences my mates have had using it. Im looking for the best Gentoo package release to install, but there are plenty. What one should I use?
Im also going to have 3 PII 450 systems available soon. What work best here too?
My major requirement will be to run samba so i dont wanna any distro which misses out on that... |
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SerfurJ
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Joined: 10 Apr 2004
Posts: 824
Location: Texas
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| Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 10:40 pm Post subject: |
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i have gentoo installed from stage 1 on the same laptop. except yours has 3x more memory than mine, so it should have less trouble with glibc. i'd say just go for it from stage 1.
i think samba will run on any distro. |
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johnny37h3r
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Joined: 07 Dec 2004
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| Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2004 11:41 pm Post subject: |
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Cool...what distro should I get tho? Besides the obviously wrong ones, Im not sure...
http://torrents.gentoo.org/
Thanks... |
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SerfurJ
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Location: Texas
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Bob P
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Joined: 20 Oct 2004
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Location: Jackass! Development Labs
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| Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 9:19 am Post subject: |
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if you're new to Gentoo i'd like to offer a word of caution - if you try to install Gentoo Stage 1 on a P166 laptop, your computer is going to be occupied doing the compile for an ENTIRE WEEK.
rather than starting off with a Stage 1 Gentoo install on such old hardware, i would recommend a Stage 3 install to get you up and running, and then selectively recompiling packages in a piecemeal fashion when its convenient. that way, your PC will still be useable if you need it, and you won't run into the circular dependency issues that are a fact of life with a Stage 1 install.
best of luck.
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dejima
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 16 Jul 2004
Posts: 130
Location: Greece
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| Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 11:25 pm Post subject: |
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since you are going to have 3 other pc(pII 450MHz) you should consider using distcc.Take a look at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml.
Using distcc you ll be able to use your 3 450 pc and your laptop to build tour packages. |
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johnny37h3r
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Joined: 07 Dec 2004
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| Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 11:39 pm Post subject: |
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| this has been great...thanks for all the responses... |
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LegacyBox
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Joined: 09 Dec 2004
Posts: 13
Location: I wish I knew.
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| Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 5:54 am Post subject: |
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I've been fiddling around with Gentoo for about a year now, but this is my first time posting on the forums.
(I felt I should start contributing in some way  )
I can definitely contribute to this topic. A while back I setup a Gentoo router on an old Compaq Deskpro running a Pentium 166 with 96Mb of RAM. I tried a stage1 install w/2004.1 (cause I had never done one before). What a nightmare... I eventually gave in and opted for a stage2 instead. I got it working and it hasn't let me down yet. I love the 'install what you need and forget about the rest' attitude of this distro.
As for the Pentium II 450s:
As I'm typing this I'm setting up yet another system with the 2004.3 minimal install... fresh from stage1. It is a Celeron 400 w/ 512Mb of RAM. Currently 4 hours into the bootstrap and everything is still running smoothly. BTW I'm following some steps from this guide:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=189250
and I have had no problems yet. Can't wait to see how it turns out.
Good luck with yours.
Edit - One more thing: I have two other systems sitting around that I will be installing w/Gentoo.
- A pentium 133 w/64 Mb of RAM, and
- A dual pentium II server with (hopefully) 1 Gig of Ram
Should be an interesting little project to setup distcc on all of these systems and see how fast compile times are.
(I love teaching old hardware new tricks!  )
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Bob P
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| Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 12:55 pm Post subject: |
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| LegacyBox wrote: | | Pentium 166 with 96Mb of RAM. I tried a stage1 install w/2004.1 (cause I had never done one before). What a nightmare... I eventually gave in and opted for a stage2 instead. I got it working and it hasn't let me down yet. I love the 'install what you need and forget about the rest' attitude of this distro. |
i had very similar experiences with a Stage 1 on a P133/64MB. it was a nightmare. after a full week i never got past the installation of X, and put that PC on a back burner. i'm looking at it now as i type this and thinking that i should get back to work on it, but a Stage 1 on that hardware is a REAL pita. i echo your recommendations for a Stage 2 or a Stage 3 on that type of hardware.
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Bob P
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| Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 1:00 pm Post subject: |
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| dejima wrote: | since you are going to have 3 other pc(pII 450MHz) you should consider using distcc.Take a look at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml.
Using distcc you ll be able to use your 3 450 pc and your laptop to build tour packages. |
the recommendation to use distcc is a good one. but distcc has some pitfalls of its own. first, its important to note that some applications will compile improperly with distcc. this creates a real headache, as it can be difficult to track down the nature of the problem. before considering the use of distcc, be sure to read the HOWTO and search the forums for threads about which applications crap out under distributed compiling.
another thing to consider is that distcc creates a bit of a chicken/egg conundrum. if you're going to do a stage 1 install, for example, distcc won't help you much, as you need to have the system bootstrapped before you can install it. on an old system like a P166, bootstrapping canl take 36 hours or so. if you have disks that use PIO instead of DMA, which is likely with a machine of this era, your times will increase dramatically. 
so the moral of the story is that distcc can help you on some tasks, but it can't help you with others, and it will screw things up on some of them. use it with caution, especially in building your system. it may be best used for apps, not for gentoo per se.
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Bob P
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| Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 1:41 pm Post subject: |
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| LegacyBox wrote: | Currently 4 hours into the bootstrap and everything is still running smoothly. BTW I'm following some steps from this guide:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=189250
and I have had no problems yet. Can't wait to see how it turns out. |
i have built about 10-12 systems using that Stage 1 guide since mid-october. as Gentoo has evolved from 2004.2 to 2004.3 lots of things have changed. with every stage 1 install i ran into different cyclical redundancy issues as the developers kept chaning the packages. so don't be surprised if you run into little problems here and there.
one thing that i would consider is not using ali3nx's guide, and instead installing from a Stage 3 and then forcing recompilation to achieve a Stage 1 after the fact. this method takes a little longer in terms of CPU cycles, but it eliminates the time that you have to spend debugging circular dependency issues.
any installation other than a stage 3 will be frought with a fundamental flaw -- it will be subject to circular dependencies within the base system, and unwanted files will remain from the stage tarball after installation because stage1/2 tarballs have incomplete /var/db/pkg -- they fail to list 80+ packages. the end result is that portage cannot effectively clean your system after the first emerge system finishes.
the solution is the "emerge -e system" recommendation made earlier. this will force everything to recompile, regardless of whether it is current or not. so if yoiu're going to recompile everything, why not make life easier on you, and start off with a Stage 3 tarball?
so my recommendation is to start off with a Stage 3 following the GIH, then bootstrap.sh as if you were dioing a Stage 1 installation (or skip it if you want to do a Stage 2), then do the emerge -e system.
the advantage of this method is that you achieve the most robust gentoo installation possible, without encountering any of the circular dependency issues and the workarounds that you have to use to get around them -- which (depending upon your skill in delveloping an appropriate workaround) may or may not provide complete resolution of the error. forcing a recompile using -e allows you to completely avoid using a "band-aid" solution to fix problems on your base system when your Stage 1 install hits a speedbump. it results in the most robust base installation possible.
| Quote: | I have two other systems sitting around that I will be installing w/Gentoo.
- A pentium 133 w/64 Mb of RAM, and
- A dual pentium II server with (hopefully) 1 Gig of Ram |
one other approach that has not been mentioned yet is using the P133 legacybox solely as an X client instead of saddling it with the duties of being both an X client and its own X server. the problem is that 64 MB of RAM just isn't enough to do both jobs without swapping. the problem is that the disk system on a system like that is going to cripple you because of its speed. you might want to investigate configuring that PC to run only as an X client, and letting one of your faster PCs on the network act as your X server. the advantage of doing it that way is taht your P133 only has to act as a display terminal, and all of the actual computing is done on your fastest machine on the LAN. the result is that your P133 appears to function as if it were your dual P2 server.
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LegacyBox
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Joined: 09 Dec 2004
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Location: I wish I knew.
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| Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 8:12 pm Post subject: |
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| Bob P wrote: | | one thing that i would consider is not using ali3nx's guide, and instead installing from a Stage 3 and then forcing recompilation to achieve a Stage 1 after the fact. this method takes a little longer in terms of CPU cycles, but it eliminates the time that you have to spend debugging circular dependency issues. |
Well, I never thought of it that way. Thanks for the advice I will try that on my next install. I've already committed too much time to my current stage1 using ali3nx's guide... So I'm hoping for the best. I'm now about 18 hours in and no errors as of yet.
| Bob P wrote: | | one other approach that has not been mentioned yet is using the P133 legacybox solely as an X client instead of saddling it with the duties of being both an X client and its own X server. |
Yes, this idea makes sense. I was already thinking along these lines but I haven't decided yet whether I'm even going to put X on that system. I've been contemplating the idea of just creating a cluster for some heavy processing with all of these older machines (and a couple of 1GHz machines).
As for the dual PII, I'm thinking of just adding that as a MySQL server and possibly a backup webserver to my network. Right now my primary webserver is running Win2K3 with Apache and I'm trying to solve that problem as quickly as possible!!! 
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loki99
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Joined: 10 Oct 2003
Posts: 2056
Location: Vienna, €urope
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| Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 9:43 pm Post subject: |
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another option would be vector linux
its based on slack so you can use v.10 packages.
i know it is not gentoo, but still! |
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LegacyBox
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Joined: 09 Dec 2004
Posts: 13
Location: I wish I knew.
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| Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 10:52 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks loki99 I'll have a look.
Ah Slackware... My first exposure to Linux was Slackware 2.3.
I still have the book by Patrick Volkerding "Linux: Configuration and Installation" must be about 7 years old now
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monotux
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Joined: 09 Sep 2003
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Location: Stockholm, Sweden
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| Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2004 3:29 pm Post subject: |
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from my experience, gentoo runs fine on older systems - I'm using it on my firewall (266 MHz, this computer is a lot faster with linux than with openbsd!), my fileserver and my old webserver had it - all these systems are ~200 MHz, some of them had like <64 MByte RAM.
it might take a day or so to get everything installed properly, and when you update your world, it might slow your computer down for a day, but it works quite alright otherwise... 
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Installing Gentoo
