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

[Nick Cunningham <nick@monkeydust.net>]

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2009/1/20 Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com<paul.hartman%2Bgentoo@gmail.com>
>

> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:46 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).
>
> My biggest suggestion for a slow machine is: distcc
>
>
For something that slow even distcc wont do that much good, there are a
number or packages that dont like distcc, and things like configure scripts
will still run on the slow pc. A better option would be to use a faster pc
to create binary packages and then point the slower pc to the binary repo,
that way to doesnt even have to try and compile anything (which imo is
crazy, im surprised OO hasnt crashed and run out of memory during its
compile!).

Do some digging, theres guides on the gentoo forums and the wiki i think for
setting up binpkg hosts.

- Nick

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