Re: [gentoo-user] initial compile time

[Dale]

Mick wrote:
> On Tuesday, 29 August 2017 12:08:12 BST Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On 28/08/2017 22:20, mad.scientist.at.large@××××××××.com wrote:
>>> |it's not so hard yet, just hard to get by reading it in advance, doing
>>>
>>> it is fairly straight forward.
>> It only seems like it might be tricky when reading it.
>> Running Gentoo involves steps that you do on almost no other distro, so
>> the words on the web page are unfamiliar.
>>
>> Almost everyone that's done it for the first time in the last 5 years
>> and reported up says "Gee, that wasn't so hard! A lot easier than I ever
>> thought it would be!"
>>
>> It's also very obvious what each step actually did, but you have to do
>> it yourself once - it's obvious in petrospec.
>>
>> Welcome to Gentoo-land. May your stay be long and happy and fruitful.
>>
>> Your next assigned task (to be done sometime in the next year) is to
>> repeat the whole process on a test rig and do it from a stage 1. Like we
>> all did 15 years ago. If serious street cred brownie points is what you
>> are after, that's how you get 'em!
> Nope.  You need to do a stage 1 on nothing newer than a Pentium 3 or
> equivalent for it to count, run out of compile space on PORTAGE_TMPDIR,
> reformat and start again.
>
> For extra street cred you would of course install ~arch and have to work-
> around every darn bug you came across by the n'th time you had to start
> recompiling from scratch, because both gcc and the profile USE flags changed 3
> times during the 2 weeks it would invariably take you to finish your install.
>
> In between all this pain, you may also discover your MoBo would hard lock
> every time your mismatched RAM modules started paging over to swap ...  O_O
>
> but after a hard reboot it would be OK until the next big compile.
>
> I understand this to be an endeavour not dissimilar to climbing Everest during
> an avalanche.
>
> PS. Did I mention you would have to do all of the above using a dial-up modem,
> which would require off-tree modules, because your PC came with a Winmodem?
>
> PPS. In case you have never been cursed with using a winmodem, check the 2nd
> bullet point at the bottom of this page:
>
>  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/winmodem.html
>


Could we not mention dial-u?  It brings back bad memories.  LOL  I used
to hate when OOo would update, which took about 26 to 28 hours to
download, only to have it update again three or four days later. 
Obviously, none of the previous tarball could be used.  :-@

I've never done a stage 1 install but if I had a decent spare rig to
play with, I'd give it a shot.  I'd just try not to shoot myself in the
foot.  o_O 

Dale

:-)  :-)