Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Eugene Rosenzweig]

Karl Huysmans wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> A friend asked me to install "some" operating system on an old Dell
> laptop he got for free.
>
> The laptop has a pentium 2 400 MHz, 6 GB HD and 256 MB RAM, and will
> be used by his young children.
>
> I have tried to install Edubuntu on it, looks nice, has a lot of very
> usefull stuff for kids, but it really runs too slow on this machine.
>
> So I was thinking Gentoo, optimized for PII, I guess -Os would be a
> good option for this little machine. Any thoughts anyone?
>
> What about the desktop? I guess Gnome or KDE is not really the best
> choice. But what else could I use? Of course, it's for kids, so I have
> to be able to make it look nice :-) What would be a good window
> manager? File manager? Other applications that help to keep it lean an
> fast?
>
> Anyone with any experience building such a system under Gentoo?
>
> Thank you
>
> Karl
>
>
I run gentoo on a p2 laptop, using fluxbox for wm. Its slow but mostly
usable although I mostly use it as a chat client so it rarely gets to
run anything other than xchat and gaim and a few xterm windows and
synergy (synergy2 project on sourceforge) for seamless access from my
main machine. Fluxbox and the rest in its family (blackbox and openbox)
are alright looking but I guess they do look a bit dated in comparison
to the latest offerings. You might want to try fvwm-crystal, never used
it myself but saw an article on it the other day, it is supposed to be
relatively lightweight and nice looking. In general be prepared for LONG
emerges though, compiling anything of size takes a long time. I use
distcc to speed that up a bit.

Eugene.
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