[ale] Linux without any of the XUBUNTU, GNOME, KUBUTNU but simple window manager

[Jeff Hubbs]

  On 8/10/10 1:58 PM, Chuck Payne wrote:
>
> My co-worker is a big Gentoo user when get got his new laptop he did
> his emerge to get installed and up and running and it took three days.
> I believe he did a lot of custom coding. But, I am not kidding on how
> long it took because he did get in trouble for not having a laptop for
> that time.
>
> Pup
>
OK, so he would have gone from bare metal to X to a WM to the basics 
like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice (binary installs are available for 
those three btw)...on a laptop's slugtastic disk drive and 1GB RAM, 
that'd have taken some time.  It's a lot nicer if you've built a 
desktop/laptop instance one time for a genericized arch (i.e., 
CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O2") and then push a tarball of it around to other 
machines.  Once you have your target up and running, if you really feel 
like it you can change the -march and the kernel processor family and 
burn some former ferns and dinosaurs eking the last bit of umph out of 
the box or you can just leave it like it is.

One thing that is nice about running Gentoo even on old and dumpy 
hardware is that pursuant to what package/version is where in a given 
arch's pipeline, you can be running the *exact same software* on your 
486 as your 16-way UltraSPARC; the same package management system 
(Portage) and package complement is there for you regardless.