Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage on dial-up connection?

From: George Shapovalov <georges@its.caltech.edu>
To: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage on dial-up connection?
Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 10:35:45 -0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <200203031828.KAA27780@chamber.cco.caltech.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <E16hTbS-00051L-00.2002-03-03-10-52-31@mail18.svr.pol.co.uk>

Hi

I am using gentoo largely with a dialup connection at home (too lazy to bring 
laptop to the lab at the times :-)). I must say, that I find gentoo the most 
"dial-up" frendly distribution. Not that it preferes dial-up over broadband 
of course :-), but it makes it possible to use it as dial-up only.

emerge rsync takes usually just a few minutes (after original one, which 
would take 1-2 hrs, but you can just grub latest portage tree (tbz2 file 
which is 4MB instead of ~20MB uncompressed) and untar it to /usr/portage).
It can resumae after disconnects if you emerge prozilla and modify 
/etc/make.conf to make use of it.
Downloading large stuff (kernel/glibc/kde...) takes a long time, but the same 
does its compilation. Just do it overnight. You don't have to coach this 
process, so in the end this distro saves your time.
If you have broadband somwhere else, you can just grab necessary sources and 
place them to /usr/portage/distfiles (this is where they end up anyways). If 
you have a few computers and don't want to duplicate all that just nfs-export 
this directory (or the whole portage or even /usr, depending on what you have 
in mind).

   So in short, yes it is definitely possible and actually even easier than 
with other distributions. If they would only parallelize source fetching and 
compilation..., but this is on TODO list I beleive.

George

On Sunday 03 March 2002 02:51, you wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Just a quick query about Gentoo/Portage:
>
> Is it possible to use Portage with a standard (and pretty slow) PPP dial-up
> modem connection (ie. 56K)? Does Portage support resume of broken
> downloads?
>
> I have a free dial-up internet connection which (annoyingly) disconnects
> itself after every 2 hours of being connected, and would like to give
> Gentoo a try, as I have so far not been completely satisfied with the
> various binary distributions I've tried and their package management
> systems. I am also a self-confessed optimisation fanatic :-)
>
> Thanks for your time.
>
> Regards,
>
> Sami Knudsen Al-Sayed
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