RE: [Sheflug] recommended 'distro' for K6 166

[Seb James <seb [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 13:21, Chris Johnson wrote:
> > Chris, I have done an install of Gentoo Linux on a PII 266
> > with 96 MB of
> > RAM. It took a looong time to compile everything, but
> > resulted in a very
> > usable machine. I used icewm rather than kde, but installed gnome
> > applications such as abiword which ran very well indeed.
> > OpenOffice also
> > worked well.
> >
> > I've just done another installation on a K5 100MHz machine
> > with 32MB of
> > RAM. I'm not going to ask this one to run Openoffice due to
> > the RAM, but
> > it runs X just fine. It took a looooooong time to compile Gentoo - in
> > particular glibc took over 48 hours, cos it was running programs that
> > were larger than the amount of ram available. The hdd had steam coming
> > out of it!
> >
> 
> 
> Seb,
> I'd forgotten you showing me that box!  Do you have to do the compile on the
> box that will eventually run Gentoo or can you feed in all the correct info
> and compile it on a faster box, then install on the one you actually want to
> use Gentoo on?

Yes I think so, but I've not done this. It depends on the compiler flags
you see. If you have a box which is faster, but which requires the same
optimization flags, you could compile on that box, then disk copy the
resultant installation (or just hoick the disk over) to the slower box.
If you have a super fast athlon or P4 box which can use all of the
optimizations that you'll use on your slower box then it could work
pretty well. In truth, with the older 586 architectures you don't get
much beyond -march=i586; I think mmx came in with 686 chips (may be
wrong here).

One thing I have done is use distcc, which can be used with the gentoo
install process. This allows the box you're compiling on to farm out cc
jobs to other machines on your network. All must be running the distcc
daemon.


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