Re: [gentoo-dev] min RAM to get Gentoo working

[Tod M. Neidt]

On Wed, 2002-02-20 at 07:59, Árni Þorvarðarson wrote:
> Hi there
>
> I heard about you at linux.org and used the link to your web site.
>
> I have lookt at the installation instructions but it is not mentiond what is
> the absolout minimum amount of RAM.  The reasone for my question is beacause
> I have some old systems (486 dx2 with only 16mb of RAM) and I would like to
> try Gentoo.

Hi!

I have Gentoo running on an old Micron Transport Pentium laptop w/ 16 Mb
of ram. Note: I was generous when allocating swap space on the hard disk
:).  This laptop runs better than ever, optimizing for PI makes a huge
difference (anecdotal, my perception no numbers to back that up :)  And
Yes!, I can fire up a gnome session when I want although I normally work
from the command-line on this machine.

Probably the bigger issue is not the amount of ram, but how much hard
disk space you have. This laptop has a 2 Gb harddrive.  I have to be
diligent in my monitoring of free disk space (cleaning up
/var/tmp/portage and such ) because builds will fail if you run out,
glibc in all its internationalized glory is a hog when compiling for
example.

If possible, I would suggest building packages on a faster machine with
more resources and transfering rather than try and compile everything on
the old machines.

Regards,

tod