I know this is a lame question. I am building Gentoo (1.4) on an old machine (AMD k-6, i586). Which clocks at like 450 ( I think). How long do you think it will take to run 'emerge system'?

Just out of curiosity...I have heard as long as 23 hours?!?

It could be 23 hours, it could be longer, on my machine (dual 1.5GHz) it took me around 26hours to compile everything I need, the installer didnt have SMP at the time, so that would be a 1.5Ghz machine, I wouldnt be surprised if a stage 2 install took the best part of 3/4 days on your machine.

Shak

also depends what you want to put on it. KDE3 will probably take an entire day by itself...

Well, he's talking emerge system here, so that excludes X, KDE and so on. 23 hours sounds ok to me.

Dear lord....
Maybe over Easter...

Hello,
I think nobody has asked you how much RAM you have, this is crucial in doing any task in Linux. If you have around 256 MB (DDRAM would be lovely) a lots of swap space, around 1 GB; you can emerge the base system in about 15 hours. I hope this is handful.

Bye

But having a K6-2 500 with 1GB of RAM wont make that much difference, the bit thats going to take a long time is the processor intensive compiling, and I dont think it will make that much difference!

Shak

Thanks all

BTW, my machine is shit 98Megs of RAM

well no, emerge system certainly doesn't include kde, if you haven't got it in your use flags....

Stage-3 baby... it's the way to go...

On some slow machines I'll cheat and create a chrooted psuedo environment on one of my beefy rackmounts at work, and then tarball the result.

Take any balsy linux box, using any modern distro and just run:

mkdir /opt/build/gentoo-i586
cd /opt/build/gentoo-i586
tar xfjs stage-1...tbz
mount -o bind /proc /opt/build/gentoo-i586/proc
cp /etc/resolve.conf /opt/build/gentoo-i586/etc/
chroot /opt/build/gentoo-i586

(Hack the make.conf to set the host type to the environment you
are building for)
(Follow the build instructions on the gentoo website, stop at the bootloader)

exit
umount /opt/build/gentoo-i586/proc
tar cfj * /opt/build/gentoo-mystage4.tbz

Than use the gentoo-mystage4.tbz instead of the normal stage(whatever) tarball.

I did this with my Cyrix-based 200Mhz laptop.

Of course, like a dumbass, I forgot to compile the kernel ahead of time (grr.) and I had to rebuild gnome (GRRR). But with this trick you can pre-build everything and the only steps remaining will be installing the boot-loader, setting the host name, and possibly configuring the network.

I'll be happy to share my pre-built pentium tarball, on request.

But isn't the advantage of Gentoo that it is customized? Can stage 3 *be* customized?

Once you get the OS running, you can customize anything you want to.

This tradeoff is, how long do you intend to spend compiling it. Really aside from glibc and the kernel, okay, any mysql, any software for your machine is called up only rarely.

If you feel your system is a bit pokey, or you make a radical change to your USE flags, you always have the option of running:

emerge --emptytree world

To completely recompile your system from scratch. (While it's doing something otherwise usefull.) I cheat. I have a cluster of machines, so I'll hve one build a package with:

emerge -b foo

So that if I don't fell like sitting through another compile I can call

emerge -k foo

to unpack the binary from the last time I built it.

(I have make.conf set up to point the packages directory to an NFS volume that stores all the tarballs from my build server.)

If you are just building a single system, this ill probably be of no use to you though...

For those of us who *don't* have access to rackmounts at our jobs....

Still, I think i will take a look at stage 3. Gentoo really looks interesting, it's just that I need that computer for class every day, so I don't have a lot of time, at least not for 36 more days....

About how long does stage 3 take, i586 etc etc...?

Thanks

As long as you don't emerge sync and download all the updates, Stage-3 is a complete system ready to layer new stuff on top of it.

Granted, all advantages of the stage 3 build evaporate after you sync. Since the installer came out I know that a lot of big packages have had updates, and they are going to downloaded and compiled unless you tell emerge better.

After my Stage-3 build I only had the Kernel, Metalog, and Grub to install. Naturally, this doesn't include X, KDE, Gnome, or Mozilla. Depending on what disk you downloaded, some of those items may be pre-built for you.

Remember to do emerge -k to employ any pre-built tools that are on your install CD.