Re: [gentoo-user] [Offtopic] Lightweight server distro for an old motherboard

[Andrew Lowe]

On 08/29/12 11:35, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 10:57 PM, Andrew Lowe <agl@×××××××.au> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>          Anyone got any suggestions for a lightweight server distro for an
>> old motherboard? I've got one of the VIA mini-ITX boards, SP13000, and want
>> to whack something light onto it. It will be working as a file/media server
>> and will be headless, hence will be fiddled via ssh. Obviously there are the
>> usual suspects, debian, centos, but does anyone have any recommendations viv
>> a vis a stripped down distro, sort of like Lubuntu is to Ubuntu?
>>
>>          Any thoughts greatly appreciated,
>
> Cripes, you're asking in gentoo-user. Of course someone's going to
> suggest Gentoo.
>
> Let it be me...and I'll explain:
>
> 1) You can put something like -Os or -O2 in your CFLAGS, whichever
> helps your performance case better.
> 2) You can target your CFLAGS to your exact processor, allowing
> generated machine code to be as efficient as possible on your CPU
> (which you'll need, if it's a low-power CPU!)
> 3) You don't have to compile on the mini-ITX board; you can
> cross-compile and use binpkgs to install.
> 4) You can use USE flags to strip out (virtually) any and every
> feature you don't use, reducing both your code size, load and
> execution time.
>
> If you want to do something lightweight, there's not much better you
> can do than with Gentoo.
>

	It had Gentoo on it for ages, and has not been updated in ages. It 
takes "years" to do anything, with respect to compiling so I'm just 
looking for a simple "point and click", binary download type of thingy 
to keep it going. I've been down the cross compile route also - once 
bitten twice shy and I don't care how many strides the dev's have made 
in recent years, I'm not trying again on principle.

	Andrew