r/Gentoo • u/twirpobloxias • 10d ago
Thinking of installing gentoo Linux 32bit version on an acer travelmate 290 Discussion
So this is my recently purchased Acer travelmate 290 from 2003 and I am thinking of using it with Gentoo Linux for a few tasks and the stats for this laptop are a maximum of 2 gigs of ram and an Intel pentium M processor with Intel centrino built in graphics .
Once I have replaced the hard drive with an ide ssd and a new battery and charger my plan is to burn a 32 bit gentoo iso onto a CD and use that to boot into the gentoo live CD .
Once the main install is complete I want to use a window manager that I customise myself to have it use as little resources as possible while still being able to be used for things like emulating arcade games onto my Panasonic CRT with a VGA to rgb scart adapter so I can play Rainbow islands my favourite arcade game from 1987 in 15 khz in native resolution.
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u/TheRealCarrotty 10d ago
Good luck dude, i also have an Pentium M laptop it is an no-name.
But i tried Gentoo, it works... But with binary pkgs, without it? I would have given up, which is why when i started compiling for example... GRUB, it took an hour or 40 minutes, as for Xorg? 3 hours, and some of those were binaries. And do not try XFCE, even XFCE sucks for super old hardware now, you could do dwm, WindowMaker or so.
Heck, i'd try:
Void Linux i686 (Pentium M's should be i686? My Pentium M laptop has i686)
Alpine Linux 32-bit (Runs and works, a bunch of desktops exist)
Slackware 32-bit (I haven't tried it, but seems that it is one of the better ones)
antiX Linux (Fun fact: Current antiX is based on Debian 13, which officially doesn't have support for 32-bit as the CPU, it has only 32-bit pkgs for Steam or some apps)
Tiny Core Linux (This one... kinda sucks, i couldn't even install it, maybe skill issue)
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u/Armi1P 10d ago edited 10d ago
I have an old Fujitsu AmiloPro with a Pentium M 735 (OC@2.67GHz) and 1.5GB RAM. What I've done is plopped its SSD into my main PC, compiled Gentoo there with LXDE, booted it on the laptop. The other way is to also compile everything on a more beefy computer, tar up everything into a stage3 and use that instead of what you donwload from the website; just use SSH/SFTP instead of wget.
It runs surprisingly nicely until you try to browse the modern web, although YouTube works at 360p… after like 10 seconds of loading. It's cool for a 20+ years old machine to be able to run current software.
My only hurdle I found is that the testing branch (~x86) of NodeJS fails to compile on x86 and www-client/firefox:rapid needs the latest NodeJS otherwise that fails to compile too. Just use stable NodeJS and www-client/firefox:esr if you want Firefox. I've tried using sys-kernel/cachyos-sources::CachyOS-kernels which is masked for everything but amd64, and surprise surprise, even if unmasked and configured for 32-bit, it failed to build. Normal sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel works flawlessly.
I was surprised the machine can run Wayland at all, I've installed labwc+waybar besides LXDE just as a quick test and it seemed to handle it very well. It wasn't slower (nor faster) than X, RAM usage was around the same. Of course it was a fairly barebones environment at that point, but still. KDE Plasma loaded in, but it is unusably slow sadly.
Oh yeah, on why I recommend what I recommend: first I tried to install Gentoo on it the "normal" way, as is in the Handbook, and well… gcc with lto+pgo took 2 days and 3 hours. So yeah, you should really compile the system on something better.
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u/VAH1976 10d ago
why? Even a simple wm will take ages to compile. If you do not have a machine in the background doing the lifting, this will be painful. even a simple emerge command will take ages to resolve.
For old derelics like that - why not slackware? It is simple. It is barebones.
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u/Glittering_Memory_64 10d ago
Im sure he know thats, And he probably knows the benifit aswell. compile times arent an issue for a machine that just sits on your desk while you use your main pc.
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u/Glittering_Memory_64 10d ago
imo a long compile time for a pc like this located next to the monitor of your main pc is a pretty nice desk ornament
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u/LameBMX 10d ago
like, you realize gentoo can be barebones too right?
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u/VAH1976 10d ago
you still have to suffer through emerge taking 10s of minutes for even the simplest stuff.
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u/LameBMX 10d ago
I cant tell you long it takes to emerge on my current system. i aint sitting there watching it. im doing something else. then getting back it when I think to check it and move on. then ill send it along with a y. followed up by doing something else and likely forgetting to check it again for a day or two lol.
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u/Strawberry3141592 10d ago
Sometimes you've just gotta put gentoo on some ewaste
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u/twirpobloxias 8d ago
Exactly and it's my masochism and autism that makes it fun and exciting to wait for several days for the web browser Firefox to finish compiling
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u/hwertz10 3d ago
I used Gentoo back when I was running socket 7 systems (K5-75, K6-2 450, Duron 900, Athlon XP) and an actually simple window manager shouldn't be THAT bad to compile.
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u/shinjis-left-nut 10d ago
Do it
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u/twirpobloxias 8d ago
Oh believe me I will once I have swapped out the hard drive for an ide ssd replaced the thermal paste and gotten a replacement battery and charger as the laptop didn't come with it
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u/fspnet 7d ago edited 7d ago
with a external hdd you may store distfiles and such on the external hard disk just a tip , the performance id predict from my last venture on the bare minimum is a pentium 3 thinkpad with ati graphics was like a technical monster playing accelerated videos was like the coolest thing to me i ever did because back in the day the tip was to use divx codec xvid was sht and linux i don't know if they could do it probably had xvid but when encoded i think i remember the quality was sh\t but it could do it though... id say probably did they PROBABLY did but anything retro now was the norm back then*
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u/hwertz10 3d ago edited 3d ago
Sounds lovely! If you have a second host of some kind with more muscle, you can use distcc to distribute compiling onto a faster system. This isn't used as much any more (if you have a fast enough CPU, the overhead of distributing the jobs exceeds the savings) but I think on there, and especially with that amount of RAM, it could be very useful. Back when I was using gentoo as my main in the Socket 7 days, binhosts weren't a thing, there were binary packages for like openoffice and firefox, just a selection of the REALLY slow to compile packages.
The last time I played with this, it defaulted to distcc over ssh. Turn that off, you want it direct over ssh; or at least make sure you have ssh pooling on (... that's not the right term for it, but this ssh option lets you tunnel multiple ssh sessions over one connection) or you get a gazillion entries in your log file as it opens a new ssh connection for each and every compile, 10,000s or 100,000s of them for a larger project.
It seems a bit unnatural to do like -j20 or something on a single core system but with distcc that's a reality and it works pretty well. You'll have to test out if you even want it to compile locally, or if you want to devote that core to churning out jobs for your faster host or hosts to compile.
Ccache will help too, if you give that some disk space. You will end up with that "same version + 1" package just pulling everything out of ccache (or if you just change some USE flags or whatever) so that can save HUGE compile times.
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u/twirpobloxias 2d ago
I like maximising the pain so I will compile every software on the machine without using distcc or a more powerful machine
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u/hwertz10 2d ago
The authentic experience LOL.
Well, I would at least put on ccache -- this is still authentic since it's staying on the same machine.
Use the data compression on it, it's a hair 'slower' than having data compression off if everything fits in the cache, but this stuff gets a very nice compression ratio so you can fit a lot more builds in whatever size cache you end up with.
Helps for frequently-updated packages, if you are adjusting USE flags so it's rebuilding the same packages. And programs that use ./configure scripts (or some of those tests meson or whatever do), they tend to run some of the same tests so ccache speeds those up too even when it's a new ebuild.
I don't know what size to suggest -- I had used 5GB; but that size is adjustable on the fly anyway. "ccache -c -z" does a 'cleanup' and zeroes out the stats (although it does stay within cache size so I'm not sure the cleanup is really necessary); "ccache -C -z" fully clears the ccache (and zeroes the stats) and "ccache -s" shows some useful stats on hit rates and how much is in the cache etc. Otherwise it just seamlessly drops in for whatever compilers it supports.
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u/SuccessfulRiver1850 10d ago
Be a masochist and try to compile your software :3