Dell Mini 12 Help

[znorris]

I just got my Dell Mini 12 and right now it's running Vista... UGH. I can't even unzip a file without it freezing up and crashing. Soooo that brings me to Gentoo. The last time i installed Gentoo was in 2005 and all i remember is:
1. It being a bitch
2. Download,Compile,Download,Compile,Repeat
3. It being the quickest more reliable and sexy OS i have used to date.
(however after all that work i reformatted my computer and installed XP because i wanted to play some shitty video game, ugh)

I have been searching a lot on Gentoo and have only come up with the Wiki on the Mini 9. (http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Dell_Inspiron_Mini)

Has anyone had a good experience with installing on a Dell Mini 12? I saw a post stating that compiling on this hardware would be a bad idea, with the SSD and Atom Processor. Any help i could get would be great. Last i installed Gentoo you had 3 stages to pick from.

thanks!
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-Z

[DONAHUE]

Use the system rescue cd http://www.sysresccd.org/Download instead of a minimal install cd. Best chance of full support of your equipment during the install, plus GUI and firefox plus other nice tools. If you need to modprobe for your NIC's driver it should be r8169. Use a current stage 3 to minimize recompiles, http://www.funtoo.org/linux/i686/funtoo-i686-2009.02.10/ . I would have recommended a gentoo experimental weekly release but they seem to be out of stock just now. Follow the gentoo handbook closely; the sysresc cd is gentoo based and represents an improved minimal install cd.

[znorris]

I already had the minimum installation cd downloaded so i made a bootable usb drive and tried it out. So far it hasn't found my NIC and 'modprobe r8169' just hangs.

I am going to keep playing around with it but will also try the system restore cd when it is done downloading. Thanks for the advice and the link to the stage 3 tar.
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-Z

[znorris]

Thoughts on CFLAGs?

The Intel Atom Z530 is what comes with a Mini 12.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Atom_microprocessors#.22Silverthorne.22_.2845_nm.29
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLB6P

Looks like the Z5XX series of Atom processors is different from the rest. For now i am going to go with a -march=i686 but i doubt that will be as efficient as it could be. If anyone has ideas i am willing to try different things.

Also need to start searching the forums for USE flags.
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-Z

[DONAHUE]

i habitually leave use flags blank in /etc/make.conf until i have a working install. the profile provides an adequate and usually trouble free set of use flags. I add flags as I add applications.

[thepowersthata]

znorris, did you ever get it working? I'm struggling with my Dell Mini 12 too. Any tips or tricks would be appreciated. Thank you.