[ltp] Gentoo on thinkpad?

[Christopher Sawtell]

On Friday 30 December 2005 06:42, Konstantin Filtschew wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 16:13 +0000, Richard Neill wrote:
> > Thanks - that's very helpful,
> >
> > Soren Harward wrote:
> > >>I'm considering making the leap from Mandriva to Gentoo on the A22p.
> > >>There are lots of advantages, but I don't know if the machine has
> > >> either the horsepower or disk space to compile from source.
> > >
> > > You probably knew this already, but compiling from source is not
> > > absolutely necessary when running Gentoo.
> >
> > I didn't realise this. I know you can get a stage 3 install - but that
> > doesn't give me any of the GUI applications.  How do you get binary
> > packages? If using binaries, are these regularly updates (eg with
> > security updates?) Could I, initially, choose to install Gentoo as if
> > it were Mandrake (i.e. selecting a package repository, installing a
> > few hundred packages), and then recompile the system as I become
> > familiar with it?
> >
> > >>Has anyone else done this successfully?
> > >
> > > If you have a faster machine available, you can always use distcc to
> > > compile most of your packages.  When you set distcc up on the
> > > laptop, put the faster machine first in the list of distcc hosts,
> > > such as:
> > >
> > >    /usr/bin/distcc-config --set-hosts "192.168.1.2 127.0.0.1"
> > >
> > > where 192.168.1.2 is the other, more powerful machine.  This will
> > > cause distcc to use the other machine preferentially for compiling. 
> > > emerges will go noticeably faster.
> >
> > That sounds useful. Does the faster machine have to run gentoo as
> > well?
>
> Yes, the other machine have to run gentoo
I don't think that's entirely correct, but you have to be able to setup and 
run the correct distcc and gcc together with the networking stuff. It's 
probably much easier to boot a Gentoo LiveCD and use that.

> and the same compiler version as well.
But that, most definitely, is absolutely true. 

> But you can use the boot cd to run distcc. I installed for 
> myself a gentoo compile system on a small partition on my desktop, works
> great.
Indeed it does.

> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml
I've been following the thread quite closely and would like to add the 
following remarks.

Consider using the livecd-x86-2005.1.iso from the experimental collection:-
http://tracker.netdomination.org/torrents/livecd-x86-2005.1.iso.torrent
or if you are allergic to perfectly legitimate file-sharing use:-
http://gentoo.osuosl.org/experimental/x86/livecd/x86/livecd-x86-installer-2005.1-r1.iso
or your nearest mirror selected from:-
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors.xml
Note that not all mirrors include the /experimental archive.

There are two big advantages offered by this LiveCD:
1) There is a visually oriented installer. It's still beta, and therefore 
might not work for you. It didn't for me, but I just gave up on it when it 
sat not doing anything at the end of the configuration phases. I fully 
expect I did, or did not do, something pretty silly.

2) You can install any and every package, even vi, :-) on the LiveCD by 
using the quickpkg command. Thus you can get a basic GNOME GUI in the 
Gentoo environment up and running without downloading or compiling _any_ 
extra packages.

fyi:
$ du -s --si /usr/portage/distfiles/
1.4G    /usr/portage/distfiles/

That's for an up to date collection which includes OpenOffice, teTeX, and a 
fairly full KDE, and lots of sundry utilities. If you can keep a distfiles 
collection available you will save on downloads because many of the minor 
updates are distributed as patchsets using xdelta on the uncompressed .tar 
file.

I have been running Gentoo for between 2 and 3 years. Although there have 
been ups and downs with it, there have been many more ups than downs. It 
would take a quite remarkable Linux distribution to make me want to 
change.

--
CS