Gentoo is installed as a guest machine on a Win XP VBox host. The hardware is a 1.6 Ghz Intel processor and the guest has been allocated 750mb of memory with 8G of hard drive.

I'm using stock settings for things like CFLAGS, and my builds are taking forever. I started installing openoffice this morning and it's been running for over 12 hours, used up 3g of disk space, and will most likely run out of space before the installation finishes. Is there a document I can reference that would help reduce the compile time and file size? I can post the output of whatever files might be relevant.

If/when the build fails I might move the /var/tmp/portage directory to a larger drive. Will that cause problems?

Also, the reason I'm installing openoffice is because I need a web authoring tool and Kompozer doesn't seem to be available in the portage library. I saw where it's available from something called an "overlay" but I haven't figured out how to get it, or if it's stable enough to use. It works fine on my Ubuntu box, but according to the web postings I've read it seems to have problems on Gentoo. Is anyone using it, or does anyone have a suggestion for a substitute? Doing a web search for "gentoo kompozer" brought up a link that suggested OOO as a substitute, but it didn't work well as an html editor the last time I tried it.


Thanks,
bob

Ironically, using lower optimization settings generally speeds up compilation, at the cost of run-time optimization. Generally -O2 or -Os is the best trade-off.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ugh - gentoo as a guest on a virtualized environment. Is that a single CPU processor ?. Better learn some patience methinks.

Why gentoo ?.

Thanks, my make.conf file is set for -02.

Yes, VBox doesn't support dual processors for the guest on my laptop due to hardware limitations. I installed Gentoo after seeing a job posting that required a familiarity with it.

Well, at least that's a valid reason ...

IMHO you'd be better off dual-booting - I only use VBox (on an i7 - Win7 Ultimate) because the box is capable of running several guests at once.
But no gentoo - that I run stand-alone (on an old P4), and it still takes forever.

1 members found this post helpful.

Enough, maybe. Far from optimal though if you plan to compile monsters like Openoffice ("OO" from now on).

Well, as someone states above, the more you "optimize" (usually) the larger the compilation time will be. The default is fine, you won't get much more out of your VM no matter what you use. A thing that *really* matters is available RAM. You haven't plenty, not enough to compile OO comfortably, that's for sure. Once you've ran out of free RAM and you start paging to disk the performance will drop (drastically, by the way). That includes compilations, of course.

OO will need around 4-6 GB of free disk space to compile. Once installed it doesn't take that much, that space is only wasted while it's compiling, and it's freed after that. However, you need that free space in whatever partition holds /var/tmp/portage while compiling OO.

It shouldn't cause any trouble as long as the permissions are adequate. You can just mount -o bind any directory into /var/tmp/portage, as long as it has enough free space. You can even mount a sparse file formated with whatever fs you like.

OO is not a web editor, and I have no idea what HTML capabilities it has. It's not the tool I'd recommend for such purpose (in fact, I just recommend reading the real thing and using a text editor, instead of drawing a web in paint-brush-like programs, I know it's not a popular solution though).

Installing an overlay is as easy as using layman. Once done that, the ebuilds are in your tree and you can handle them just like any other ebuild in the official portage tree, taking into account that some of them might be in the unstable branch and/or masked (the official Gentoo handbook explains perfectly how to deal with that).

About stability, well, Gentoo can't take any responsibility for those ebuilds since they are not audited by the Gentoo project at all (though some overlays work in cooperation with some Gentoo developers, but in any case outside the official project).

Some of them might be perfectly stable, some of them might be perfectly broken, some of them might work today, and not tomorrow, or vice-versa.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/overlays/userguide.xml

Not all the overlays can be handled via layman, though.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, I'll leave the CFLAGS alone.

The build failed after using up the 3G of open space on the drive, so I've moved the directory to a larger drive and will restart the build. Compile time is annoying, but it's not critical.

I can do a limited amount of HTML editing with Emacs. It slows me down but most of my pages are built off the same template and don't require extensive editing.

Thanks for the information.