[gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Karl Huysmans]

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Hi All,

A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell laptop
he got for free.

The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will be used
by his young children.

I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.

So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a good
option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?

What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best choice.
But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have to be able to
make it look nice :-) What would be a good window manager? File manager?
Other applications that help to keep it lean an fast?

Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?

Thank you

Karl

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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Uwe Thiem]

On 12 October 2006 12:21, Karl Huysmans wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell laptop
> he got for free.
>
> The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will be
> used by his young children.
>
> I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
> usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
>
> So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a good
> option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
>
> What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best choice.

With 256MB of ram, KDE should run fine. When the whole thing is installed and 
ready, don't forget to prelink the whole system. Makes a hell of a lot of a 
difference when it comes to startup times of apps.

Uwe

-- 
Mark Twain: I rather decline two drinks than a German adjective.
http://www.SysEx.com.na
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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Eugene Rosenzweig]

Karl Huysmans wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell
> laptop he got for free.
>
> The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will
> be used by his young children.
>
> I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
> usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
>
> So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a
> good option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
>
> What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best
> choice. But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have
> to be able to make it look nice :-) What would be a good window
> manager? File manager? Other applications that help to keep it lean an
> fast?
>
> Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?
>
> Thank you
>
> Karl
>
>
I run gentoo on a p2 laptop, using fluxbox for wm. Its slow but mostly
usable although I mostly use it as a chat client so it rarely gets to
run anything other than xchat and gaim and a few xterm windows and
synergy (synergy2 project on sourceforge) for seamless access from my
main machine. Fluxbox and the rest in its family (blackbox and openbox)
are alright looking but I guess they do look a bit dated in comparison
to the latest offerings. You might want to try fvwm-crystal, never used
it myself but saw an article on it the other day, it is supposed to be
relatively lightweight and nice looking. In general be prepared for LONG
emerges though, compiling anything of size takes a long time. I use
distcc to speed that up a bit.

Eugene.
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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Jerônimo Backes]

> So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a 
> good option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
>
> What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best 
> choice. But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have 
> to be able to make it look nice :-) What would be a good window 
> manager? File manager? Other applications that help to keep it lean an 
> fast?
Man, I've installed gentoo in a Pentium III 450MHz with 128 MB RAM. The 
apps I've installed were:


- KDE: It was very fast, but it took four days a week to compile. If you 
think that installing KDE doesn't worth the effort (if you are afraid 
that KDE may be sluggish), install slackware with KDE just to see how it 
will perform on that hardware.
- OpenOffice.org: I was able to run OOo. It was a little (yes, just a 
little) slow, but worked well. I also recommend you to install koffice, 
because it is lightweight.
- The Gimp, Inkscape, Thunderbird, etc.: were swift and fast.

DO NOT install firefox. It is crappy on slower machines. Stick with 
konqueror and avoid headaches.

Everything should run better than you expect on that machine. If you are 
in doubt because of performance concerns, try slackware just to test 
what you can be executed on your machine. With gentoo you'll have to 
compile everything (and it will take a week), but it will pay the 
effort, because everything will be faster.

		
_______________________________________________________ 
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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Mark Shields]

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On 10/12/06, Karl Huysmans <karl.huysmans@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell laptop
> he got for free.
>
> The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will be
> used by his young children.
>
> I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
> usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
>
> So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a good
> option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
>
> What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best
> choice. But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have to be
> able to make it look nice :-) What would be a good window manager? File
> manager? Other applications that help to keep it lean an fast?
>
> Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?
>
> Thank you
>
> Karl
>
>
>

I just started (last week) using xfce on a VNC box - slot A Athlon 600 mhz,
512mb of ram.  I can't tell you what it would normally use if running
locally, but xfce is using 40mb currently, vnc is using 15mb, and vnc uses
about 13% at idle.

-- 
- Mark Shields

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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Chris Frederick]

Karl Huysmans wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell laptop
> he got for free.
> 
> The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will be 
> used
> by his young children.
> 
> I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
> usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
> 
> So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a good
> option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
> 
> What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best choice.
> But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have to be 
> able to
> make it look nice :-) What would be a good window manager? File manager?
> Other applications that help to keep it lean an fast?
> 
> Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?
> 
> Thank you
> 
> Karl
> 

I've got an old NEC and Thinkpad that I use for VNC clients to my 
server.  I've also loaded a "bare bones" desktop system in case I take 
them out somewhere.

I've loaded fluxbox, dillo, spruce, mplayer, and some assorted games 
(pysol, xbomb, xtris, etc...)  Surprisingly this system responds better 
then my Win2k server at work.

I have a dual xeon server that I did all the building on, then I just 
boot the laptop to the minimal cd and partition drives and use the tar 
file from my server in place of the stage3.  Then just load grub, 
reboot, and you just saved yourself days of compiling.

I used -O2 for compiling, and since I use my server to do all the 
building from, I delete /usr/portage before I load it on the laptops. 
this puts me around ~850M for a complete system (My laptops only have a 
2G/3G hard drives with 96M/128M ram).

Chris Frederick

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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Brian Davis]

I've also used -O2 on my Pentium 2 Celeron system without any problems.

I used to run -Os back on my Pentium 200Mhz days, and that works fine 
too ;).

Honestly, however I never did any benchmarking between the different -O 
settings on any of these machines, so I'm not sure they were the best 
setting to use. These were recommendations I'd gotten from the forums.

Caveat: there is no GUI involved on either of these systems, just 
headless servers.

Thanks,
Brian

Chris Frederick wrote:
> Karl Huysmans wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell 
>> laptop
>> he got for free.
>>
>> The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will 
>> be used
>> by his young children.
>>
>> I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
>> usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
>>
>> So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a good
>> option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
>>
>> What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best 
>> choice.
>> But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have to be 
>> able to
>> make it look nice :-) What would be a good window manager? File manager?
>> Other applications that help to keep it lean an fast?
>>
>> Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?
>>
>> Thank you
>>
>> Karl
>>
>
> I've got an old NEC and Thinkpad that I use for VNC clients to my 
> server.  I've also loaded a "bare bones" desktop system in case I take 
> them out somewhere.
>
> I've loaded fluxbox, dillo, spruce, mplayer, and some assorted games 
> (pysol, xbomb, xtris, etc...)  Surprisingly this system responds 
> better then my Win2k server at work.
>
> I have a dual xeon server that I did all the building on, then I just 
> boot the laptop to the minimal cd and partition drives and use the tar 
> file from my server in place of the stage3.  Then just load grub, 
> reboot, and you just saved yourself days of compiling.
>
> I used -O2 for compiling, and since I use my server to do all the 
> building from, I delete /usr/portage before I load it on the laptops. 
> this puts me around ~850M for a complete system (My laptops only have 
> a 2G/3G hard drives with 96M/128M ram).
>
> Chris Frederick
>
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[gentoo-user] Re: Lightwheight Gentoo System

[James]

Karl Huysmans <karl.huysmans <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> Hi All,A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell
laptop he got for free. The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB
RAM, and will be used by his young children.
> Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?Thank youKarl

Hello Karl,

I'm sure we all have our 'horror' stories as compared to intallation on
a resource rich machine. You eventually get their, but the price
is usually extensive. The more you install these older machines,
the smoother, somewhat, it gets. I use them for firewalls, and
minimal servers. During my last installation, I ran across this link
that might be the way to go. I have not install a 'gnap' gentoo
system, but, it's on my todo list of new (gentoo) experiences.

One more note, Vapier is 'the man' on all things gentoo-embedded.
He and many other astute gentoo-embedded folks hang out at:

gentoo-embedded@gentoo.org


Which desktop/X package you intend to use, or a X-client is something
that I have not looked into, in using gnap. Others on this list or
on the gentoo-embedded may be able to provide recommendations and 
advice is gnap it the way to go for your needs.

If there was a Gen_bunto CD for older p2 and p1 machines, all of the
kids in my hood would be using gentoo........

hth,
James



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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Lightwheight Gentoo System

[michael]

On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, James wrote:

> [...]
>
> If there was a Gen_bunto CD for older p2 and p1 machines, all of the
> kids in my hood would be using gentoo........
>
> hth,
> James


ROTFL - thanks for the laugh James. Gen-bunto - what a concept. My two
favorite distros right now are Gentoo and Ubuntu, and I wonder about the
philosopical implications of liking what seem to be polar opposites. Human
nature, perhaps.


Regards,
Michael "My other computer runs (Gentoo,Ubuntu)" Shiloh
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[gentoo-user] Re: Lightwheight Gentoo System

[James]

 <michael <at> michaelshiloh.com> writes:


> > If there was a Gen_bunto CD for older p2 and p1 machines, all of the
> > kids in my hood would be using gentoo........

> ROTFL - thanks for the laugh James. Gen-bunto - what a concept. My two
> favorite distros right now are Gentoo and Ubuntu, and I wonder about the
> philosopical implications of liking what seem to be polar opposites. Human
> nature, perhaps.


Hello Michael,

Actually, it's not as far fetched as one would
anticipate. There are quite a few wikis that
show how to build a cd for lower speed processors
from a faster machine. Someone with skills would
only have to define what's different, between
 a 200MHz AMD vs a P2 and set up thoses
few different files once. As different older
machines are added these few files would be
customized for the various (common) arch's of the
various older machines.

Then lots of admins could each manage a few machines
for the kids in our neighborhoods. I'd do mine over
wireless ethernet and thru the local cable tv network.
I've collected up lots of old hardware for this
purpose....oneday. CFengine would be keen to 
push/manage binaries down to these machines
over TCP/IP. Distributable CDs would be great for
recruiting new members to the Gentoo community.



Therefore we would not have to perform all of the compiling
on these machines, just distribute binaries at night
once a month or so, or print/distribute a CD to
the kids and others with lesser skills/resources.

The only trick is to put up a light-weight desktop,
that would be appealing to many. With an open-mosix
kernel, we could even cluster these machines for
aggregated power, once open-mosix stabilizes
on 2.6 kernels. That way, a group of gen_bunto
users could pool their individually meager resources
into something special, or as more old machine become
available, each kid could build their own cluster:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_Mythtv_With_
Diskless_Workstations_in_an_OpenMosix_Cluster

That's the gentoo differential: if the gentoo 
community was to embrace this effort, it could
easily put together something awesome and unmatched
by any other distro/operating system, anywhere.

Here in the US, there are lots of place that will give
you working machines, if you just show up to haul them
away. That number increase exponentially, when you
are willing to spend $5-25 dollars.

Eventually, the gentoo community will get around to this
need for a binary distribution for categories of 
similar/common machines. Recruiting kids into gentoo, would be the 
smartest move possible, for the future of Gentoo, in my opinion.
It's easy for me to motivate schools/clubs/groups of kids
to use linux, it's just difficult to organize and time
consuming, under the current gentoo semantics. After using
Gentoo for a few years, I'm getting rid of my openbsd
and debian boxes..... I like the concepts that drive
*buntu, I just strongly  prefer gentoo.


James




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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[michael]

i use xubuntu on an old laptop, and it's quite snappy.

although i'm sure you could get snappier results with gentoo



On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Karl Huysmans wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell laptop
> he got for free.
>
> The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will be used
> by his young children.
>
> I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
> usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
>
> So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a good
> option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
>
> What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best choice.
> But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have to be able to
> make it look nice :-) What would be a good window manager? File manager?
> Other applications that help to keep it lean an fast?
>
> Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?
>
> Thank you
>
> Karl
>
>
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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Geistteufel]

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A solution for this old computer to install it quickly is to use
anothoer computer for compiling it

after just use the binary package results !

On another gentoo or any  other system else, create a directory,
decompress stage 1 and start an install like you will do on old machine

After, just install all you want on it,

so run a live on old box, prepare computer (partition), just go to
before uncompress stage1, so copy you installation from other computer
on it,
make kernel, lilo/grub so reboot, all done

you can save a lot's of time !

After all install, you want to add something, no prob, just use distcc
and configure it to only use other computer to compile (not localhost
:))

Well, Kde can be really fast, but you have to select package manually
(don't use "kde" portage, it install lot's of think)

just install all you need, one by one, konsole, kwin, konqueror ...
think to clean USE for a minimalist kde install

other desktop that could by good is gnome, but don't really know how to
enlight it

Xfce-4 is really light too, firefox could by a little be long to run
(need some memory ...), with kde you have konqueror but render not
really the same, you have to see

Use correct compilation option: -Os -march=i386 (or i486 .. depend on
exact model of computer)

Gentoo could be adapt to any system I think

For just fast and ultra light install on old computer, I would prefer
Debian Sarge distribution, fast to install, really optimizing for small
system, easy update ... It's another solution

Just to know want if you want to install a gentoo to show to kid how it
work, or just a fast install just to see or it work

so ...

Have fun

On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 08:43:56AM -0700, michael@michaelshiloh.com wrote:
> i use xubuntu on an old laptop, and it's quite snappy.
> 
> although i'm sure you could get snappier results with gentoo
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Karl Huysmans wrote:
> 
> >Hi All,
> >
> >A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell laptop
> >he got for free.
> >
> >The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will be 
> >used
> >by his young children.
> >
> >I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
> >usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
> >
> >So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a good
> >option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
> >
> >What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best choice.
> >But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have to be able 
> >to
> >make it look nice :-) What would be a good window manager? File manager?
> >Other applications that help to keep it lean an fast?
> >
> >Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?
> >
> >Thank you
> >
> >Karl
> >
> >
> -- 
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
> 

-- 
Geistteufel
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Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Karl Huysmans]

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Thanks all for your thoughts.

I have tried Windowmaker as one of the lightweight window managers meanwhile
on my own laptop, it loads indeed extremely fast compared to my usual KDE,
but at first sight I can't possibly imagine this into a desktop a kid would
like to use. After all, the idea is to get the kids used to a computer and
give them the best experience possible with Linux.

Good too hear some of you say KDE should do fine on this hardware, so I
think I'll go for this option, an indeed prelink. After all, it's what I
know best too, and there are many other tweaks to make it faster. Most of
the applications I wont to install come from kdegames and kdeedu anyway.

Compiling is no problem, I'll do this one our dual core Opteron server at
night, and just rsync the chroot directory over to the laptop.

Thanks again.

2006/10/12, Geistteufel <geistteufel@yahoo.fr>:
>
> A solution for this old computer to install it quickly is to use
> anothoer computer for compiling it
>
> after just use the binary package results !
>
> On another gentoo or any  other system else, create a directory,
> decompress stage 1 and start an install like you will do on old machine
>
> After, just install all you want on it,
>
> so run a live on old box, prepare computer (partition), just go to
> before uncompress stage1, so copy you installation from other computer
> on it,
> make kernel, lilo/grub so reboot, all done
>
> you can save a lot's of time !
>
> After all install, you want to add something, no prob, just use distcc
> and configure it to only use other computer to compile (not localhost
> :))
>
> Well, Kde can be really fast, but you have to select package manually
> (don't use "kde" portage, it install lot's of think)
>
> just install all you need, one by one, konsole, kwin, konqueror ...
> think to clean USE for a minimalist kde install
>
> other desktop that could by good is gnome, but don't really know how to
> enlight it
>
> Xfce-4 is really light too, firefox could by a little be long to run
> (need some memory ...), with kde you have konqueror but render not
> really the same, you have to see
>
> Use correct compilation option: -Os -march=i386 (or i486 .. depend on
> exact model of computer)
>
> Gentoo could be adapt to any system I think
>
> For just fast and ultra light install on old computer, I would prefer
> Debian Sarge distribution, fast to install, really optimizing for small
> system, easy update ... It's another solution
>
> Just to know want if you want to install a gentoo to show to kid how it
> work, or just a fast install just to see or it work
>
> so ...
>
> Have fun
>
> On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 08:43:56AM -0700, michael@michaelshiloh.com wrote:
> > i use xubuntu on an old laptop, and it's quite snappy.
> >
> > although i'm sure you could get snappier results with gentoo
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Karl Huysmans wrote:
> >
> > >Hi All,
> > >
> > >A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell
> laptop
> > >he got for free.
> > >
> > >The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will be
> > >used
> > >by his young children.
> > >
> > >I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
> > >usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
> > >
> > >So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a
> good
> > >option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
> > >
> > >What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best
> choice.
> > >But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have to be
> able
> > >to
> > >make it look nice :-) What would be a good window manager? File
> manager?
> > >Other applications that help to keep it lean an fast?
> > >
> > >Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?
> > >
> > >Thank you
> > >
> > >Karl
> > >
> > >
> > --
> > gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
> >
>
> --
> Geistteufel
> Signature PGP :
> ID                : 0x517215AF
> FingerPrint       : AFAB B3CE 0ACF 2551 478B  0B73 D84B 8C6D 5172 15AF
> Public Key Server : hkp://subkeys.pgp.net
>
>
>

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