Red Hat
Lucas Peet
lpeet at eccod.com
Sun Oct 27 11:47:16 CST 2002
Duane Attaway wrote:
>Redhat 4.1 was my first when it came out. I was hooked and later tried
>suse, slack, mandrake, and attempted debian. At the moment, I'm a gentoo
>junkie. In my very biased opinion, I found gentoo the easiest
>distribution to install and use (try installing and actually using redhat
>on an old P120 with 32MB of ram...)
>
Yes, but how many weeks did it take to compile and install on a system
like that??
>Its great being able to recompile the system to be sleek and agile like a
>light weight race car or every bit as rough and tough like a Mac dump
>truck. Since all the tools are laid out like a well kept machine shop, it
>begs me to tinker with the code, learn, and build the most interesting
>things. I found gentoo to be highly addictive and haven't found a way to
>break the habit yet. There's nothing more satisfying than compiling lines
>of fresh code. It lifts the spirits, cures the blues, and they haven't
>outlawed the GPL (yet.)
>
And what do you occupy yourself with while you recompile the system and
other code?
I installed gentoo on my P200 with 128MB ram and it took 3 days just to
compile X and KDE, and a full day and a half to install - and this was
going off the stage 3 install!! The compiling kept throwing errors, and
I never was able to get KDE compiled - I ended up having to change the
optim lines in /etc/make.conf (to something less than optimal), and that
fixed some errors, but still wouldn't compile right.
I'm convinced that Gentoo is not for older machines at all - throw a
binary distro on those - something fast, like Slack. Gentoo is for
workhorse boxes, boxes that can compile the kernel in under 2 min.
Gentoo would be great on a box like that - it'd be nothing to compile
code on say, an Athlon XP 1.4Ghz with 512MB ram. But after my
experience on my P200 w/128MB, there'd be no way in the world I'd even
try and attempt it on a P120 w/32MB...
Just my 2 cents...
-Lucas
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