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Nat495
n00b
Joined: 03 Nov 2007
Posts: 1
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 Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 10:59 pm Post subject: Installing Genteoo Troubles with the install-x86-minimal-200 |
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Hello. I thought I'd attempt to get an old computer to work as a low power server. However, after a few bumps with the BIOS, new hard drives, floppy disks, and CD-ROMs. I finally got to the livd cd booting off of Smart Boot Manager. However, when I get to boot I type in gentoo acpi=off. It does the loading of gentoo and gentoo.igz Then it says you passed an undefined mode number, press return to see video modes available, Space to continue or wait 30 seconds.
This is where the error begins:
I hit space and then it reads, "Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel." After which, it sits there doing seemingly nothing.
Specs: Yes...it's old.
Pentium 1 120Mhz
16MB Ram
floppy disk drive
CD-Rom drive
1.6GB hard drive
40GB hard drive
video card: s3 trio64v+
Ethernet card
28.8K modem
Creative Soundblaster
Thanks for your time. |
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erik258
Advocate
Joined: 12 Apr 2005
Posts: 2650
Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA
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| Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 11:29 pm Post subject: Isn't gonna work that way. |
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| Quote: | I finally got to the livd cd booting off of Smart Boot Manager...
...
Specs: Yes...it's old.
...
16MB Ram
... |
You're talking about a live-cd here, Nat495. There's no way you're gonna be able to use a live-CD on this computer. I would be surprised if it could even boot a minimal CD. The cds will fail to boot because the system has too little ram to hold the contents of the filesystem that, uncompressed from CD, must be loaded into RAM.
You might be able to do it if you can specify swap space from the kernel boot line. However, this is probably the wrong direction from which to attack this problem. Instead of booting a pokey, bloated livecd, or even a much smaller, feature-rich minimal, on the slow old pentium itself, take out the disk that is meant to house the root filesystem I strongly suggest the 40G, because it will be much faster) and put it in a faster surrogate installation host.
You can add the system into a previously installed linux environment supporting the 'chroot' command, or boot from a livecd on your main workstation without thrashing your existing OS. Then follow the instructions in the gentoo handbook to complete the install process.
I recommend installing all you can on the fast box, to save yourself time. That pentium is really going to crawl - in fact, it may not be capable of installing its own software, if the sources are too big. You might consider hosting the entire filesystem remotely, and booting from the network or a minimal boot environment on local disk, then mounting an NFS root. This has the advantage that all installation can be done on a faster system, and the filesystem could go the speed of the network -- a substantial amount speedier, most likely, than the ancient 1.6G hard drive which will probably clock in at only a few megabytes a second. At the very least, you should consider using a separate host to build binary packages for the pentium.
When installing, remember to use a 586 stage3, as a pentium can't run 686 code. Make sure the CHOST is of the 586 variant too, or you'll not be able to run most of the programs you install.
If you want to compile remotely, distcc can be configured for cross-compiling.
I assure you that once the system is installed, a pentium-120 with 16MB ram is certainly capable of performing many network services. It would excel as a router for any network with which its interfaces could keep up, and would probably do a good job as a print server, or a dhcp server, or DNS. My router uses about 16MB of ram , is under negligible average load, and is running openvpn (serving), dhcpd, gkrellmd, hostapd, named, sshd, and ntpd. Of these, cutting named out would save about 10M.[/b]
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Nick C
Guru
Joined: 18 Mar 2005
Posts: 526
Location: Portsmouth, England
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| Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 2:52 am Post subject: |
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about the only thing i would say to try is ignore gentoo and go with damn-small-linux, but im not even sure that will run ok.
Another problem you will find with gentoo is all the stage3 tarballs use i486 as a default chost (i think, it may even be i686 these days) which will mean no binarys will work if you use a stage3, this problem may extend to the livecds too, so potentially nothing will run even if the livecd can be booted.
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wers
n00b
Joined: 14 May 2007
Posts: 40
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 4:04 pm Post subject: |
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erik258, good day and thanks for great post!
I have several questions to you:
1. Is there any manual of process to install gentoo on one environment and then move to another?
2.You mentioned NFS. What is this and where do you recommend to read about this?
Thanks for your replies. |
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Installing Gentoo
