[ale] small distro for old hardware + kids

[Jeff Hubbs]

Gentoo would be just fine - and I've done it several times on junkers 
all the way down to P/60 - but I have some caveats.

Compared to a Debian or Slackware desktop machine, you need somewhere 
between 1GB and 3GB more disk space between /usr/portage and 
/var/tmp/portage in support of Portage, the Gentoo build system.  You 
can keep that at bay by culling things out of /var/tmp/portage and 
/usr/portage/distfiles from time to time, however, you may still have 
problems accommodating that extra disk footprint.  This is one place 
where we could really use a Linux file system that supported on-the-fly 
compression/decompression a la NTFS, especially since these files in 
particular compress really well.

Seeing as you're probably stuck at 128MB, you'll want to put -Os in your 
CFLAGS in make.conf and rebuild everything at some point after 
installation. 

-Jeff

Cliff Free wrote:

> If you've got enough time on your hands, Gentoo should be able to 
> squeeze some decent speed out of that thing.
>
> On 2/28/06, *Robert Story* < rstory-l at 2006.revelstone.com 
> <mailto:rstory-l at 2006.revelstone.com>> wrote:
>
>     So, now that I've solved my flash problem, I'm looking at other
>     distros for
>     this old laptop (K6-500MHz, 128MB ram). DamnSmallLinux is indeed
>     small, but
>     doesn't seem very user/kid-friendly.
>
>     Any suggestions?
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