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

[Dan Cowsill <danthehat@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 3:45 AM, Grant <emailgrant@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>

Yeah, Gentoo can be a big O/S if you let it.  I recently installed
Gentoo on an eee 701 with 512M RAM and the 8 GB SSD.  I decided to use
the minimal USE flag with a few exceptions.  This keeps the size of
X11 down and affects a few other packages in that vein.  Also, I used
XFCE in place of Gnome.  You can still have Gnome apps on it (if you
are willing to commit the extra disk space) and the memory foot print
is much smaller.  I used ccache to help out with compile times, so
even on the 500MHz processor, it still took less than a day to slap
X11 together.

Have a specific idea in mind for what you want the computer to be used
for.  My eee does three or four things really well and that's it.
Some may say it's archaic, but I thought it was a great learning
experience.  That said, installing Gentoo on an eee 701 was such an
incredible pain in the ass...  Not for the faint of heart.

D