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On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Grant Edwards <grante@××××.com> wrote: |
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> I'm in the process of installing Gentoo on a rather old |
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> machine. It's an old HP Pavilion with a 450MHz Celeron |
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> Mendocino and 256MB of PC133 SDRAM. I'm using an nVidia PCI |
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> FX6200 video board instead of the i810 on-board chip, and it's |
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> got a decent hard drive (160GB). |
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> |
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> I was wondering if there were any particular tips/tricks for |
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> getting the best performance out of such a machine. It's to be |
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> used for basic word processing and a few games. Hopefully the |
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> nVidia 6200 will allow OpenGL to run fast enough for something |
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> like TuxRacer. |
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> |
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> I chose XFCE for the desktop along with both Abiword and |
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> OpenOffice. I probably should have installed OOo from a binary |
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> package, but I decided to build it just to see how long it |
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> would take (so far it's at about 26 hours and counting). |
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> |
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> -- |
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> Grant Edwards grante Yow! I just remembered |
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> at something about a TOAD! |
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> visi.com |
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|
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Grant, |
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We used to use a machine very similar to the one you discuss as a |
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Gentoo desktop machine. I built Gnome and it worked fine. I personally |
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like fluxbox which is a very light environment. Currently it's |
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operating as my main mythbackend server with two PVR cards in it. |
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Still going strong. |
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The one thing I would respectfully suggest is that you carefully |
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build your own portage overlay. My experience with Gentoo over the |
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last few years is that there is a _anxiousness_ in the portage |
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maintainer area to move newer revisions of software into portage |
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quickly and then just as quickly to remove from portage what users are |
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currently using. This forces folks to build more often and on a |
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machine like you are talking about that can be fairly painful. There's |
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no harm in masking higher revisions of software. The only issue I've |
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run into is eix-test-obsolete telling me I have something installed |
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that's no longer in portage. However with your own portage overlay I |
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beleive you could get beyond this. |
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|
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I don't personally use the portage tools for building binary |
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backups of packages - and probably I should. You might look at that |
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also. |
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Good luck, |
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Mark |
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