Re: [gentoo-user] Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?

["Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com> wrote:
> I'm in the process of installing Gentoo on a rather old
> machine. It's an old HP Pavilion with a 450MHz Celeron
> Mendocino and 256MB of PC133 SDRAM.  I'm using an nVidia PCI
> FX6200 video board instead of the i810 on-board chip, and it's
> got a decent hard drive (160GB).
>
> I was wondering if there were any particular tips/tricks for
> getting the best performance out of such a machine.  It's to be
> used for basic word processing and a few games.  Hopefully the
> nVidia 6200 will allow OpenGL to run fast enough for something
> like TuxRacer.
>
> I chose XFCE for the desktop along with both Abiword and
> OpenOffice. I probably should have installed OOo from a binary
> package, but I decided to build it just to see how long it
> would take (so far it's at about 26 hours and counting).
>
> --
> Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! I just remembered
>                                  at               something about a TOAD!
>                               visi.com

Grant,
   We used to use a machine very similar to the one you discuss as a
Gentoo desktop machine. I built Gnome and it worked fine. I personally
like fluxbox which is a very light environment. Currently it's
operating as my main mythbackend server with two PVR cards in it.
Still going strong.

   The one thing I would respectfully suggest is that you carefully
build your own portage overlay. My experience with Gentoo over the
last few years is that there is a _anxiousness_ in the portage
maintainer area to move newer revisions of software into portage
quickly and then just as quickly to remove from portage what users are
currently using. This forces folks to build more often and on a
machine like you are talking about that can be fairly painful. There's
no harm in masking higher revisions of software. The only issue I've
run into is eix-test-obsolete telling me I have something installed
that's no longer in portage. However with your own portage overlay I
beleive you could get beyond this.

   I don't personally use the portage tools for building binary
backups of packages - and probably I should. You might look at that
also.

Good luck,
Mark