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

Mr_Shameless · Last edited by Mr_Shameless on Wed Jun 13, 2007 1:23 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hi. I have an old computer which is a Pentium II MMX 300MHz with 256MBs of RAM, 4.3GB hard drive, currently running Windows 98 SE. Everybody knows windows 98 sux. It cant even recognize a USB stick. This computer is too old for windows XP, though.

Im considering replacing windows 98 with a linux distro, and I like Gentoo. The reason I choose Gentoo is that among the Linux distros I've try, plus FreeBSD, it has been the fastest and most responsive so far. No matter what people say, I do feel the difference between Gentoo and other distros.

Now I wanna ask if any of you has any experience on this.

Im planning to install IceWM, iDesk, Opera 6, Gaim, Audacious, Mplayer, Abiword, Gnumeric, XPDF, GQview, Leafpad, XFE on that machine. CFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -Os -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer", LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1".

1. Will these programs work well? I dont care how long it takes to compile the programs. I just need to know how they will perform on this machine.

2. This computer does nothing important. So, can I omit the system log?

3. Is the hard drive a little too small? Will the above programs fill it up? I think I will use 32MB for /boot and 256MB for swap.

4. Is there any kernel other than gentoo-sources that works well on older machines?

(PS) 5. Apps based on GTK and QT, usually which is better on old machines?

Thank you

di1bert · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 963 Location: Oslo, Norway

I would go for it. It's going to take a long while to compile things though...

Mr_Shameless · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 1:57 pm Post subject:

Opera 6 works acceptably on windows 98 on that machine. I dont know how it will perform on Gentoo.

By the way, in case it is too slow, is there any alternative? Usually I see people suggesting Dillo as a lightweight web browser but it is too "simple", not supporting javascript

.

di1bert · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 963 Location: Oslo, Norway

There doesn't even seem to be a ebuild for Opera 6 on my system

I'd stay away from anything QT as to me it seems a little bloated...Perhaps try
galeon or kazehakase for a lighter web browser, both of which are built on GTK and
both are fairly light...

-m

John R. Graham · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 2:42 pm Post subject:

I run a 90 MHz P1 with 128Mb or RAM as a home router. Gentoo runs fine on it, but compiles are sloooow.

- John

Mr_Shameless · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 3:05 pm Post subject:

Thank you for your suggestions of browsers. I will check them out

I dont know why i enjoy so much the feeling of using an old machine and trying to find the most efficient things for it. This is called masochism, rite? lol

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

Opera is probably the fastest full-featured browser you're likely to find.

I used Opera 5->8 on the precursor to this system, which was an AMD K6-3 400 (I forget the RAM... it was more than 256MB 'tho. Probably 512?), and it was perfectly usable.
I know from previous experience that on older systems it's *much* faster than than Konqueror, Galeon and Firefox (Well, it was Phoenix back then IIRC).

Try 9 first and see how it goes, otherwise just download 6 from Opera directly and install it yourself into your user area - Manually installing apps that have nothing depending on them is perfectly fine - Not everything has to be emerged!

But if you do emerge it, use the qt-static version - It's far more stable and slightly faster than the qt-shared version which Gentoo defaults to for some reason. (It also saves you having to install QT if you don't have it already!

)

--
Apps built on GTK1 will also be find on your system but, unless things have changed drastically, anything GTK2 will be pretty bloaty and sluggish.
(The difference between gtk-gnutella(GTK1) and gtk-gnutella(GTK2) on my K6-3 was just scary. On my current system, a dual-core opty, the difference feels negligible...)

--
Any of the standard kernels should be fine - Trim out as much as you can, then compile all the rest into the kernel itself (Maybe a handful of modules for stuff you might need, but only rarely) and you'll be fine

--
For optimum speed, I'm afraid you'll have to avoid KDE or GNOME (I see you figured that already 'tho

)
IceWM is a good choice.
If you do feel the need for a desktop manager 'tho, I can highly recommend XFCE.

Also, and I haven't tried this, but if you have a half-decent 3D card in that box, beryl might be an option too - It'll take a lot of the actual drawing load off your main CPU too!

NotQuiteSane · Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 4:11 pm Post subject:

ChojinDSL · l33t Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 784

As long as you compile everything either via distcc or completely on another machine and then just transfer the binaries, gentoo will probably be the best distro for that PC.

The harddrive space might get a little tight though. You can solve this by either constantly keeping an eye on /usr/portage/distfiles, /tmp and /var/tmp and deleting files if necessary.

You can also host /usr/portage via NFS from a different machine if you should choose so. You only need it when you are emerging.

I once installed a Gentoo Stage1 on a Pentim 1 (no MMX) with 96MB Ram. I compiled everything on a different pc using a chroot installation and then copied everything via rsync.

I forget how large the Harddisk was, but its was quite small. So I had a identical chroot installation on a faster pc which I used for compiling and then only copied the finished binaries. On the Target PC itself I got rid of /usr/portage alltogether.

I have to say I was very pleasantly suprised with how useable this machine was.

I installed Dillo, Opera and Firefox, as well as XMMS, AbiWord and a few other apps. The whole thing was running on a fluxbox desktop.
I even installed mplayer but it was simply too slow for divx and xvid so I got rid of it again.

Firefox of course took a while to get started but once it ran it was quite useable, even with tabs. Opera was the better choice in this case since it ran faster. Dillo was extremely quick, but not really that useable since it was lacking a lot of features and displayed a lot of websites incorrectly.

The best thing about it was, I was able to have Abiword open in the background, several tabs in Opera, Sylpheed-claws fetching email, and still have xmms playing mp3s smoothly and uninterrupted in the background.

Your machine should be able to handle pretty much everything you throw at it rather well. Apart from maybe mplayer. I was able to play DVDs and divx/xvid videos on a PentiumII 300mhz, so you never know.

chrbecke · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 2:06 pm Post subject:

rwf · Apprentice Joined: 24 Jan 2004 Posts: 234 Location: mi.us

I run Celeron (Memdocino) -- cpu MHz 399.109. Mem 256984k

I have no problems. I initially installed kde and gnome. Later removed them. Run mozilla-firefox/openoffice/opera/java

You 'might' have a problem w/ disc space though.

zxy · Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 9:22 pm Post subject:

i just finished an install on p2 333Mhz (overclocked to 418Mhz) 256Mb and 20Gb disk.

I installed lots of kde apps. Konqueror works ok here as a browser, too. And firefox was installed just because it is needed for some special apps, but works ok, as does Opera.

Mplayer is working ok for watching movies (it was impossible to watch them on Windoze)

KTorrent is working ok. (I didn't even want to try azureus here :wink:

)

I didn't use gentoo-sources for a long time, instead some patch-sets from Unsupported Software have shown much more responsive system.

I use LDFLAG hashstyle=gnu from binutils 2.17.50.* and it has proven to speed up the startup times of programs.

The hard disk you use is a bit small, but IIRC I had made a Gentoo install on 4Gb drive once.

Oh, and setting the write caching to on helps, too:

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

I run Gentoo 2005.1 on a Pentium-S with 64MB of RAM; however, I don't
use a windowing system. It's slow to boot (and shutdown) but a fairly
practical test machine for eg. wireless networking. I'd add more memory,
but the board runs more slowly with 96MB due to the strange M/B caching
hardware.

It runs Win 98SE ok, and you can in fact get USB flash drives, at least,
working under Win 98 SE. However, you have to get the appropriate
USB card and memory stick drivers from the net, and that's not easy.

I got Gentoo onto the system by booting it with the Damn Small Linux CD,
and then downloading pre-compiled binaries from another Gentoo box.

Hope this helps - Will

slycordinator · Advocate Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 3065 Location: Korea

Opera 6 ebuilds can be found at http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/net-www/opera/?hideattic=0

Though no guarantee it'll install on a recent system as those ebuilds were removed at least a couple years ago.

And when you download the ebuild you'll need to change it to use "www-client" instead of "net-www" as the category.

Mr_Shameless · Posted: Fri Jun 29, 2007 1:05 pm Post subject:

wow, thank you really

bertaboy · l33t Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 604

I would only recommend it if you have another computer compiling for you. I felt compiling programs was tough enough on my 800mhz P3 I have laying around, I couldn't imagine what it would be like on 200mhz.

If you can't have another computer do the heavy lifting for you, I would recommend Slackware. I had that running on an old Gateway 200mhz computer a while back and that seemed to be appropriate.

John R. Graham · Posted: Sun Jul 01, 2007 3:42 pm Post subject:

You all might be interested in this topic: "most insane machine you ever installed Gentoo on ?" My personal peak of insanity was a 90 MHz Pentium I with 80 MiB of RAM and a 4.5 GiB hard drive (successfully installed, still in use today as a home router).

- John

gohmdoree · Guru Joined: 12 Oct 2004 Posts: 533

i have gentoo running on an old micron pentium 233 mmx, with 64mb of ram. i forget how much disc space i have, might be 10gb.

it runs okay more or less. compiles do take longer, but distcc on a faster machine shouldn't be so bad.

its really just been a bare bones machine that i just mess around with.

AllenJB · Veteran Joined: 02 Sep 2005 Posts: 1285

i92guboj · Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 4:55 pm Post subject:

PaulHindt · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 6:02 am Post subject:

I have Gentoo installed on a Celeron 300a w/ 192MB ram and a 10GB hard drive. It is running on Fluxbox w/ Firefox, Gaim, and Openoffice even! Things run a bit slow but not too bad. The only downside is that it took a couple days to compile all that stuff. I would say go for it.

Hossie · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 116

It works fine. Even KDE and Firefox run fine. KDE takes a few days to compile though, I think kdelibs alone took nearly a day.

ahurst · Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 10:43 pm Post subject:

Don't try and use a recent LiveCD - they only run on i686+.

If only the Universal x86 CD was still around - sigh.

Andy

theethicalatheist · Posted: Sat Aug 04, 2007 2:34 am Post subject:

ahurst · Posted: Sat Aug 04, 2007 8:01 am Post subject: