Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] initial compile time
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 22:08:31
Message-Id: 68835801-78ba-d0d3-b9a2-fe47b4534c41@gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] initial compile time by Mick
1 On 29/08/2017 18:47, Mick wrote:
2 > On Tuesday, 29 August 2017 12:08:12 BST Alan McKinnon wrote:
3 >> On 28/08/2017 22:20, mad.scientist.at.large@××××××××.com wrote:
4 >>> |it's not so hard yet, just hard to get by reading it in advance, doing
5 >>>
6 >>> it is fairly straight forward.
7 >>
8 >> It only seems like it might be tricky when reading it.
9 >> Running Gentoo involves steps that you do on almost no other distro, so
10 >> the words on the web page are unfamiliar.
11 >>
12 >> Almost everyone that's done it for the first time in the last 5 years
13 >> and reported up says "Gee, that wasn't so hard! A lot easier than I ever
14 >> thought it would be!"
15 >>
16 >> It's also very obvious what each step actually did, but you have to do
17 >> it yourself once - it's obvious in petrospec.
18 >>
19 >> Welcome to Gentoo-land. May your stay be long and happy and fruitful.
20 >>
21 >> Your next assigned task (to be done sometime in the next year) is to
22 >> repeat the whole process on a test rig and do it from a stage 1. Like we
23 >> all did 15 years ago. If serious street cred brownie points is what you
24 >> are after, that's how you get 'em!
25 >
26 > Nope. You need to do a stage 1 on nothing newer than a Pentium 3 or
27 > equivalent for it to count, run out of compile space on PORTAGE_TMPDIR,
28 > reformat and start again.
29 >
30 > For extra street cred you would of course install ~arch and have to work-
31 > around every darn bug you came across by the n'th time you had to start
32 > recompiling from scratch, because both gcc and the profile USE flags changed 3
33 > times during the 2 weeks it would invariably take you to finish your install.
34 >
35 > In between all this pain, you may also discover your MoBo would hard lock
36 > every time your mismatched RAM modules started paging over to swap ... O_O
37 >
38 > but after a hard reboot it would be OK until the next big compile.
39 >
40 > I understand this to be an endeavour not dissimilar to climbing Everest during
41 > an avalanche.
42 >
43 > PS. Did I mention you would have to do all of the above using a dial-up modem,
44 > which would require off-tree modules, because your PC came with a Winmodem?
45 >
46 > PPS. In case you have never been cursed with using a winmodem, check the 2nd
47 > bullet point at the bottom of this page:
48 >
49 > http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/winmodem.html
50 >
51
52
53 Let's see, the most bottom line stage 1 I ever did was on an AMD athlon
54 cpu with 512M Ram and an 80G IDE Drive. Didn't have the mobo lockups
55 tho, but did have the devil's own time fiddling with overclocking and
56 other goodies in the BIOS. Eventually I just selected "Optimal" and let
57 them damn thing figure out what it thought was best...
58
59 Sadly, I missed the whole winmodem saga and never had a need to use one.
60 I had a US Robotics 56k dialup modem and in those days almost all mobos
61 came with serial ports. So I probably got lucky.
62
63 there's also the fun and games 20 years before that typing silly games
64 on a ZX Spectrum, saving to cassette tape and hoping the bloody thing
65 plays back OK. But that's a whole other story and I'm sure you are not
66 even vaguely interested :-)
67
68 --
69 Alan McKinnon
70 alan.mckinnon@×××××.com