Need help making a new install decision

[PbF00T]

Hello all,

I need to fairly quickly rebuild my production laptop, and I want dump RH7 in favor of Gentoo. The target laptop is a Thinkpad A22p, 1Ghz, 384RAM

To check things out, I downloaded and installed the latest Stage 1 RC (4?) and successfully installed it on an old Thinkpad 770Z I had around. (366Mhz, 128RAM) I managed to get KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, Mozilla and VMWare running in about six days. KDE was about half those six days.

<This is the point where I exclaim how much I like Gentoo, and extend my thanks to all those involved in making it happen. I really like clever ideas, and Gentoo is a clever implementation of a clever idea.>

Here is the question. I have to rebuild my A22p over a weekend, it has to be working on Monday morning. So I'm thinking of using a Stage III. I'm assuming that over time, pretty much everything will get recompiled anyway. Is this a correct assumption?

Keeping in mind, I like to keep at least a year between laptop rebuilds (rebuilds are fun, but I don't get paid for 'em) which Stage III version should I start with? Should I use RC2, and go with the i686 code? or should I use RC4, and use the more generic compile.

Another option might be to do Stage 1 and just install Fluxbox. My minimum required apps are basically VIM, a Terminal window, SSH, VMWare, any decent browser and GAIM. How much KDE and Gnome is required to make Fluxbox do it's thing well, without ugly fonts.

So what does everybody think, what are the good compromises to make to get Gentoo up and running in two days?

[jeversol]

[puggy]

With a bit of clever partitioning you could keep RedHat and install gentoo from chroot so it wouldn't matter how long it took as you'd still have a working system. For quickness stage 3 is the way to go. You could use some pre-compiled binaries as well if your desperatley short of time... like if you require openoffice compiling it takes about a million years so...
emerge -k openoffice will install its binary instead of compiling from source. You can compile it from source later to speed you up a bit.

If your machine is mission-critical like you've seemed to have indicated I'd strongly reccomend keeping Red Hat until you've got gentoo up and running perfectly in case something goes wrong or you get stuck for a while on the install.

Good luck.
Puggy
_________________
Where there's open source , there's a way.

[jlg]

well its saturday now but anyway to make it fast you could have made a tar of the install on the old laptop and then untar on the new one