Re: [gentoo-user] Anyone running a Netbook satisfactorily on Gentoo?

[Florian Philipp <lists@f_philipp.fastmail.net>]

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Grant schrieb:
> I've installed and updated Gentoo on my girlfriend's Acer Aspire One
> netbook and it's just so slow.  The only things I can think of to
> speed it up would be to upgrade the RAM from 1GB (not sure if that's
> possible) and/or swap out the SSD for a HD.  Anyone running a netbook
> not excruciatingly slow?
> 
> - Grant
> 

I've got an Acer One for my father. I don't know the exact type; it is
the one with the 8GB SSD.

I found it quiet usable, installed Gentoo with a minimal KDE3 on it.
Compiled with -Os, of course. RAM usage is below 256MB most of the time.
The only things I didn't get to work are 3D acceleration and the SSD
card slots but I haven't invested much time into it.

The slowest part of the system is the SSD. It really slows things done
when they are loaded for the first time (for example the HTML part of
Konqueror takes 3s to load AFTER Konqueror itself came up).

The rest of the system is pretty fast for my expectations.I compiled
most things in a chroot on my Celeron notebook (2 or 3 times the speed)
before moving it over but I really found compiling not _that_ slow. Its
usable for most regular updates and even kernels and such alike. For
larger packages, I mount an NFS share on /var/tmp/portage because I
don't want to wear down the SSD.

Other tips:
Use ext2 FS. You don't want the journalling to cost you even more
performance and wear down the SSD.

I wouldn't use laptop-mode. You don't want it to bog down the system
when it decides to flush its write cache.

No syslog, it will only wear down the disk with many small write cycles.

Use the noop IO scheduler (boot parameter elevator=noop). There is no
need for a scheduler on an SSD.

ArchLinux also recommends deactivating DRI ('Option "DRI" "0"' in
xorg.conf) to free up 32MB of memory.

Hope this helps.


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