[ILUG] Old PC and gentoo

[Robert Kiely]

I've setup two Gentoo boxes and am very happy with their boot up speed
and overall good responsiveness. I also like that I know pretty much
exactly what's on them and that there is absolutely no extra unused
rubbish all over the place including loads of servers and stuff that
aren't going to get used ever.

Despite what people say it doesn't take that long to compile it all
from stage 1 but the good news is that you don't have to... you can
use precompiled packages to build the system and emerge (the
installation "tool") can use precompiled packages too for anything
else you need. So if you don't want to compile everything... then
don't !

emerge also uses USE flags too which allow you to add or remove
support for stuff like kde and qt or gnome and gtk if its not
installed on your system and makes some binary files smaller.

I'd say give it a try... it runs well on my compaq AMD K6II 550 Mhz
with 248MB ram (8M is shared video ram.... yuck).

Compiling your own kernel definitely makes a difference in my opinion
but if you don't want to do this you can use genkernel which will
generate a generic kernel with lots of stuff turned on so it should
work straight "out of the box"...

Rob