Gentoo on a Gateway Solo 2500

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

I have an old Gateway Solo 2500 with a 2GB Hard drive. I have a netgear wireless-G card for it. Windows 2000 is installed on it right now. I really only use the thing for the occational homework assignment and for my dedicated chatting machine, and I run dnetc on it just because I can't let a 200Mhz processor go to waste. It actually has a ton of RAM for a system of its specs... 224MB of RAM. I want to put Gentoo on it, and use fluxbox, firefox, maybe open office, gaim, and maybe xmms because sometimes I listen to music on it too.

The only reason I want to do this is because this is the only system I can leave on without my parents getting pissed, and I believe gentoo would be most stable. But I don't know about the hard drive space. I had gentoo installed before my 10GB hard drive died, I had to put in the hard drive that came with it, oh well.

I suppose this operation would require all the space saving skill in linux there are. also, I want about 500MB free for misc. stuff. Also, do you think this wireless card work with the liveCD?

What do you all think?

scarr · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 1:00 am Post subject:

2 Gb would be fine. Of course, it depends on what you want to do with it.

You wouldn't be able to compile OpenOffice.org on it, but you could install the bin.

You will have to keep an eye on your distfiles folder so you have enough room for other stuff. Something else you could do is share the portage tree from one of your other computers on the network so you don't use any hard drive space on the Gb.
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electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

SOmething else I wonder is if it'd be speed efective for me to do it. every other time I put linux on a slow computer, it sucked. But this is Gentoo, I plan on a stage1 install, since I have all the time in the world to set it up, becuz I don't need to have it avaliable any time. I have plenty of other computers. I was considering having distfiles as a network mount.
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/dev/random · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 1:13 am Post subject:

No need to waste your time on a stage1 install. I did a stage3 install for a friend who wanted to do similar things with his old pentium2 box. He was shocked by how fast everything was running.

If the wireless card needs ndiswrapper to work than forget about the livecd working with it.

chunderbunny · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 1:34 am Post subject:

Having distfiles as a network mount is a good idea, that'll certainly cut down on the space needed (and if you're using Gentoo on two computers it'll cut down on the amount of downloading you need to do as well.) One thing you might want to do is to try and do the installation in as many small steps as possible, and clean out /var/tmp/portage as often as possible. Make sure you DON'T use ccache as it is unlikely you will be compiling same package more than once.

scarr · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 1:40 am Post subject:

Linux has usually run better on older hardware. Especially if I didn't setup a GUI.

Like I said before it depends on what you want to do with it, and it's speed. If you are planning on creating a PVR with playback ability, then no it wouldn't work, but an Email/web/print server would work great with most CPU and Memory configs.
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electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

Just one thing I wouldn't prelink the system ever, or you may corrupt everything... not that you said you were going to, but just something to keep in the back of your mind.

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

QV · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 54

Yes.

I've done so before, for my uni's new Linux lab. The hard drive was actually 6GB, but we only had 2GB for Gentoo. Each machine would get a different distro, plus Fedora (so the machines would have a common distro if needed). We ended up having a 50MB boot partition (thanks to Fedora's over-bloated kernel), a 2GB partition for the machine's distro (Gentoo, in the case of the machine I set up), a 2GB partition for Fedora, and the rest would be divided between swap and /home (/home was separate so we could switch to NFS-mounting it later, once we got an NFS server set up on another machine).

It went fine, but here's one big hint: once the kernel is compiled and you've made sure you didn't make any mistakes with it, unmerge the kernel sources and delete whatever's left in /usr/src. Believe me, kernel sources eat up a massive amount of disk space--I wasn't able to compile Xorg, for disk space reasons, until I got rid of the kernel sources.

Another tip: if you have enough access to another machine to set up NFS on it, do so. I later got /var/tmp/portage NFS-mounted on the file server (we hadn't moved /home over tho, as we hadn't set up LDAP on all the machines yet, so I couldn't reclaim its space), so I was able to not worry about disk space when compiling. I mansged to get a full install of KDE 3.3 up and running, so you shouldn't have too much worries about space for applications, especially if you use something lighter (hint: if you really need the space, Fluxbox isn't bad).

Oh, and to answer your last question, the P2 is i686. Everything since the PPro has been i686, in fact. While the terminology is stuck at "i686", the actual processors aren't. The PPro, P2, P3, and PM all use the same basic subarchitecture, but the P4 doesn't. The P4's subarch really should be called i786, but for some unknown reason, isn't.

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

How about some sort of compressed hard drive?? is it worth it, or practical for speed? Under Windows, not too much hard drive read/writing goes on, mostly only when I'm opening firefox or gaim for the first time and of course booting. I guess it keeps firefox in the RAM becauze many times when I open a new firefox window, even after closing all firefox windows the process ends, it still does hardly any drive reading.

If it would be practical, how would I do about do this anyway. Thanks.
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pmazer · n00b Joined: 09 Oct 2004 Posts: 22

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

I've decided on just doing a stage2 install. I can get most of the customizability I can get with stage1, so... that will do...

I still need input about the compressed file system. Would it do much good? And if so, how would I go about this? May just use the compressed filesystem for lesser important things. I dunno.
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Laptop: 15.4" MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz, 2x1GB RAM, 160GB, Mac OS X 10.5.1
Server: PIII 550Mhz, 3x128MB RAM, 160GB, Ubuntu Server 7.10

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

Current Status:

Nearly 4.5 hours into the bootstrapping. It's going great. Yes, very slow, but expected. The root partition itself is only 486M of 2G filled. I didn't create a swap partition because it has 224MB of RAM which is a lot for a computer of its specs. I'm pretty sure that it's not needed. If it is, i'll just dd a file to root and make a swap file. It's better that way because I can more easily manage my swap space or the lack of. I also found a guide that will help be with getting the sound working hopefully and it already has an X configuration file to use which seems pretty good. I'm heading to bed here soon and hopefully bootstrapping will be done by morning so I can start moving on to stage3 before school starts.

Here's my make file:

PMT · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jan 2004 Posts: 212

Tips from someone who ran Gentoo on his Thinkpad R51 with a 2 GB HD for four months:
1) If you have a server or such, you can get away with storing the entire /usr/portage/ directory [EXCEPT distfiles/, that has to be a local folder] easily on a network filesystem [I used NFS, try what you wish], and symlinking the entire contents. That'll save some disk space. Failing that, you can just tar cjvf the entire /usr/portage folder and decompress it only when you absolutely need it.
2) Install only what you absolutely want. I know it's rather obvious, but installing kde is a waste of time if you just want kdebase. Packages build up fast.
3) Conversely, configure your USE flags to not install anything you don't absolutely want.
4) Regularly purge distfiles and temp files...especially /var/tmp/log and Mozilla tempfiles, they eat space like mad if you leave your system on for too long. Also, .xsession-errors sometimes fills with harmless complaints.
5) tar c[jz]vf is your friend. Use it on any documents you can.

That's about it. Oh, and keep a fully-featured [not just install, if you can avoid it] LiveCD handy, just in case.

EDIT: I just have to ask. Why are you running apache2 on a 2 GB hard drive? WHY?
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Lews_Therin · l33t Joined: 03 Oct 2003 Posts: 657 Location: Banned

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