Re: [gentoo-user] Lightwheight Gentoo System

[Chris Frederick]

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've got an old NEC and Thinkpad that I use for VNC clients to my 
server.  I've also loaded a "bare bones" desktop system in case I take 
them out somewhere.

I've loaded fluxbox, dillo, spruce, mplayer, and some assorted games 
(pysol, xbomb, xtris, etc...)  Surprisingly this system responds better 
then my Win2k server at work.

I have a dual xeon server that I did all the building on, then I just 
boot the laptop to the minimal cd and partition drives and use the tar 
file from my server in place of the stage3.  Then just load grub, 
reboot, and you just saved yourself days of compiling.

I used -O2 for compiling, and since I use my server to do all the 
building from, I delete /usr/portage before I load it on the laptops. 
this puts me around ~850M for a complete system (My laptops only have a 
2G/3G hard drives with 96M/128M ram).

Chris Frederick

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