will gentoo work on PII MMX 300, 256MB RAM?

[centaurus]

I actually installed gentoo over last weekend on a PII 350mHz CPU with slightly over 256 MB RAM (stats show 370MB but that's because I added a card with extra memory). It took me the best part of the weekend to finish the installation. I had initial problem with dhcp - didn't download the right package and fixing my /etc/fstab.

I just use basic stuffs like fluxbox and a couple of tools to play around with. I just download the source tarball of firefox from mozilla website and install it as a self contained browser - it's quite speedy though. Both wm and applications and this has to be due to the slimmed down kernel.

A word of caution to anyone who try to attempt this kind of job: compiling on an old hardware will make your hair turn gray.

[Sprotte]

I use gentoo on two pentium 1's.

- A 166 MMX laptop (96MB, 20GB harddisk)

- A 233MMX headless minitower (96MB, 6 GB, CD burner, DVD)

I originally installed Gentoo 1.4 from stage 1 on the laptop, can't remember about the server. Using distcc, ccache and a number of network utils.

The server does Internet, DNS, iptables, and local rsync mirror. Plus burning cds.
The laptop does browsing, mail, Quake, and a number of other things.

Some apps:

app-editors/scite (good, but might be dropped in favor of vim)
app-emulation/wine (looking to drop this because it's compile-intensive)
net-irc/irssi
media-sound/mp3blaster (also good: ogg123, mpd)
x11-wm/openbox
media-gfx/fbida (framebuffer picture viewer etc)
media-sound/sweep (this drives the comp to its limits)
app-office/abiword (would be nice to have a binary package here)
x11-misc/xnview (X picture viewer)
media-gfx/gimp (seldom used, again binary package would be nice)
app-shells/zsh
mail-client/mutt (with getmail, nbsmtp)
games-emulation/zsnes (runs FF, Chrono Trigger etc)
app-editors/vim
media-gfx/xloadimage (sets wallpaper)
media-gfx/fbv (see fbida)
www-client/elinks
x11-terms/tilda (good, but might swap for normal terminal again)
www-client/opera (faster than firefox, quick install but needs qt)
media-video/mplayer (video is pretty much out of the question here though)
app-misc/screen
games-fps/prboom

outside of portage:

Quake, Quake2, Nethack, Dungeon Crawl

Some server apps:

media-video/vlc (did some streaming experiments etc)
app-cdr/cdrtools (burning)
media-sound/cdparanoia (ripping)

I was originally going for a GTK-only system, but since Opera works so well, I might switch to QT. I have pondered that for some time now. I think there is a QT version of abiword and even gimp. I might simply drop gimp though, almost don't use it.

I used binary packages wherever possible, and modular X as you can imagine was greatly appreciated.

Anyway I might get new hardware soon I took this as far as I could, and more FPS in Quake would be nice. As well as watching videos/DVDs. I'll also not buy a laptop again, because it's not easy to repair and upgrade. I once fixed its keyboard by using liquid silver. That one was close.

Those are really the only reasons to get faster hardware, apart from the horrendous compile times (distcc does help.) I got used to computers running overnight.

I developed a routine of updating only the System profile (not world), which is the same on both machines, using quickpkg and rsync to copy stuff over, and I may update individual apps on top of that. Seriously, I don't need the newest version of mutt.

It was a good learning experience setting this up. Other OSes tried were Windows 98, FreeDOS/MS-DOS, Suse Linux, Knoppix, and FreeBSD. Gentoo ended up surviving all of them, despite the compiling issue (on faster hardware, this should be no problem.)

I think that Gentoo is mega-flexible and can be used to build really efficient systems under impossible circumstances. Use stable and only unmask a handful of apps, use sane cflags, update system twice a year, and learn to use quickpkg, rsync, distcc and friends.

That's it.

[dmpogo]

I had Gentoo on PII-266, 386 Mb RAM. Skipped on Gnome/Kde - used plain fvwm + precompiled firefox.
Main limitation was a harddisk space - I had only 6 Gb harddisk